


Going to California

by Safiyabat



Series: Disintegration [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Series, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2013-11-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 09:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam leaves for Stanford, and John and Dean pick up a hunt in Fall River because it's as far from Palo Alto as they can get.  Both sides of the split find something unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Made Up My Mind To Make A New Start

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in a series of fics about the years the Winchesters spent separated. I initially intended to make this series entirely about Sam, but after a series of conversations with tumblr user bangingpatchouli I thought it would be more interesting to look at both sides of the family.
> 
> Supernatural and the characters from the show are not my property. I make no money from this or any other work of fan fiction.

Sam He put the last of his personal weapons in the second bag and zipped it shut. How this decrepit old farmhouse was even connected to the grid boggled his little mind. He’d have thought that after last year’s events they’d be able to catch on to things like unexpected draws on power but apparently not. He looked around. Peeling wallpaper, crumbling drywall – an abandoned building in every sense. It wasn’t much different from any of the countless abandoned buildings that they’d stayed in over the past nineteen years, abandoned buildings and condemned buildings and buildings that were half a step above either. Never again, at least not for Sam.

Their father had chosen this for them. It wasn’t as though he’d been incapable of working. Hell, he’d apparently been co-owner of a business back in the day, in the before-time. The time Sam couldn’t remember, when they’d been a family instead of an army. (When Dean had been an only child.) He’d kept a reasonably nice roof over his wife and son’s head too, and separate rooms for both sons (when the destructive second son had wormed its way into their lives.) Then everything had collapsed and he’d turned his back on everything beyond the barest subsistence, not only for him but also for the two small lives attached to him. Sure he paid lip service to things like keeping them safe and crap like that but seriously? What was safe about sticking a kid in a house with rotting floor beams and exposed wiring? What was safe about handing an eight year old a loaded pistol and telling him to shoot anyone who came through the door? What was safe about isolating two kids so much from the world around them that there was no one they could turn to in the local community if something happened, like oh say getting evicted from the motel because their father only paid for a week and then disappeared for three? No. If Dad wanted to live that way that was fine for him. Sam was done. He could hope Dean came with him, but there was a reason he had the bus schedule in hand. 

He hefted his bags and walked into the living room. Living room, common room, whatever. The room in which the remaining members of his family were currently making themselves comfortable or what passed for it. Dean’s eyebrows drew together in confusion, John’s in anger. “Where do you think you’re going?” the latter demanded, rising to his feet. He’d been looking at the local newspaper; it looked like the obituary section. It probably had something to do with the local hunt. Sam hadn’t paid much attention, not that Dad would have given him much in the way of detail. He was kept on a pretty strict need to know basis, and as far as John was concerned he needed to know to put one foot in front of the other and the exact moment to pull the trigger. Nothing else.

“California,” he replied. “Palo Alto, remember? Stanford?” Dean turned pale and rose to his feet, but remained silent.

“The hell you are, boy. We’re in the middle of a hunt.”

“No. You’re at the beginning of a hunt, not in the middle. And I told you about this back in friggin’ March.” There was an odd numbness starting in his extremities and spreading up into his torso. It oddly resembled terror but he was resolved not to let it show. “This can’t be a surprise for you.”

“No, but I figured you’d come to your senses. You, at Stanford? Come on, Sammy,” Dean scoffed. “I mean, first of all, how do you think you’re going to pay for that? I mean, sure, you do a fine job covering our trails on the credit card scams and everything but really –“ 

“I got a scholarship. Full ride. Tuition, room and board, books, laptop. Everything. All I have to do is get myself there.”

John snorted. “What the hell makes you think you deserve a full ride to a place like Stanford? You have a job to do, boy, and it doesn’t involve sitting around on a beach reading books all day. Your place is here, getting revenge for your mother. Or did you forget about her? Are you too selfish to do right by the woman who gave you life?”

Once that might have worked on Sam. Familiarity, however, breeds contempt. “I never actually knew her, so I can’t really say, but do you really think that this is what she’d want for us? For me, for Dean? Falling-down shacks we can’t stay in if the wind picks up? Getting shot at and tossed across –“

He was cut off by his father’s fist connecting with his face. He’d expected that really. John Winchester had never been one to neglect a weapon and if one didn’t work he was more than happy to use the other. Clearly words weren’t effective here so he’d decided to go for option two. It wasn’t the first time he’d taken a swing at his younger son, and he wasn’t stupid enough to think it would be the last. Not if he gained his point and Sam stayed, that was. This time, though, Sam actually put his bags down. Instead of putting a hand to his face to check the small cut near the already-forming bruise around his left eye his own fist shot out and connected with the older man’s jaw. Of course, he knew John wasn’t some schoolyard bully unused to getting hit back. He was strong but John had taken hits by monsters made from solid iron, for crying out loud. He swung out to the side of his father’s head with his other hand, bringing his first hand back to block his face.

John got a couple of punches in to his chest but Sam managed to kick him away. It was a technique he’d figured out not terribly long ago while sparring with the man. He never expected kicking – spirits almost never used it, and Sam was even taller than John now. Between leverage and significant lower body strength he managed to push his father into the wall, knocking a lot of plaster down onto him. He was dazed but not knocked out. “You selfish piece of garbage,” the veteran spat out through the dust coating his face. “Does your family really mean that little to you, that you think you get to just walk away from our job? Our mission?”

“They’re your job,” he retorted. His father was screaming but he wouldn’t. He would keep his temper, hard as it was. “Your mission. I was six months old when you took this crap show on the road. I never enlisted in your stupid army and I’m not a god damned soldier.”

“You were a piss-poor soldier at any rate. Absolute crap at following orders,” John grunted, trying to get to his feet and failing. Sam noticed his use of the past tense but he didn’t let himself gloat or get complacent. He wouldn’t consider it a victory until he was gone. 

The teen resisted the urge to go kick his parent in the ribs while he was down. He didn’t want to leave a live enemy behind him. He knew it was a bad idea, but then there was the whole patricide thing. “Families don’t have orders and chains of command!” he barked out instead. “They have bonds of love and trust and those don’t exist between us!” He grabbed his bags and turned to his brother. “Dean, I’d love it if you came with me. You know you can do so much better than this –“

Dean’s face turned from incredulous to disgusted. “Better than this, Sammy? Are you kidding me? Better than saving people? Better than hunting down all the evil, supernatural sons of bitches out there and killing them? Better than finding what killed Mom and giving it what’s coming to it? Boy I just don’t get that.” His hands balled into fists.

“All right. Well, I’ll see you around, Dean.” So much for that hope. He’d known it was faint anyway. 

Dean turned his back. John managed to get halfway to his feet but Sam didn’t turn around. It was a risk, a calculated one. He couldn’t turn around – it would be too weak, too much of a confession of John’s authority. At the same time, he knew his father was just as likely to put a bullet in his head as he was to let him leave the family business alive. “You walk out that door don’t you ever come back, you hear me?” John Winchester roared at his son. “Don’t you ever come back!”

Sam bit a hundred retorts back behind his lip. He didn’t even slam the door behind him, just let it swing quietly shut.

John 

The farmhouse wasn’t bad as squats went. Three useable rooms, running water in one bathroom and electricity. What more could anyone possibly want from free housing? He’d gone to the trouble of liberating some folding chairs and a card table from an unsuspecting Knights of Columbus hall while the boys were out getting food and doing reconnaissance. Things between the three of them had been pretty peaceful since Sam had finished school. He knew he should be grateful. He knew he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and just appreciate quiet. John Winchester was many things. Stupid was not one of them.

John had two sons. Every once in a while, deep in the darkest and most vile places of his heart, he wondered about that but for the most part he accepted that his beautiful, saintly and perfect wife had presented him with two little boys. His firstborn had never given him more than superficial trouble – occasional worries about drink or drugs or putting his bits where he oughtn’t. Normal kid stuff, things that could be predicted. He did what he was told, when he was told to do it. He was on board a hundred percent. He even looked right – blond like Mary, smiled like Mary.

The other one, though – he was a tough one. Sam didn’t drink, not when John was in town. He didn’t do drugs either, and while John was generally opposed to drug use he sometimes thought his broody younger offspring could do with a good toke to take the edge off. The boy was all edge, and those edges were sharp as hell. If John always knew what Dean was thinking or what he was going to do, Sam was a complete mystery to him. The boy was a mystery because getting him to open his mouth in his presence took ten men and a crowbar. He had a hard time even getting the kid to eat in his company, like he was afraid of catching something from the air John exhaled. Sam did no more than the minimum, ever. If asked a direct question he answered it, but he answered in as few words as possible. Usually two – “Yes, sir” or “No, sir,” and twin alien hazel orbs glittering in the street lamps. If told to run he ran the minimum number of miles John ordered. If ordered to shoot at targets he shot exactly as many rounds as directed. The boy took no pleasure in it. He took no pleasure in anything, as near as John could figure out. He thought he’d seen Sam smile once, when he didn’t know his father had been around. They’d been at Pastor Jim’s, and he’d been in the library. He’d been what, all of six? Six and couldn’t even muster a smile for his own father? That was it – he didn’t know the boy.

Dean was easy. Dean liked life. He liked a good hunt, a good bender after a good hunt. If the bender included the company of a lady (or two, or three) so much the better. It was easy to reward him. There was no possible reward for Sam, no way to let him know he’d done well. There was no way to let him blow off steam either, not if he wasn’t going to view hunting as cathartic in any way. And that was it. The boy just would not knuckle down and accept that this was his life. If that was Dean John would have an easier time understanding it. Dean knew what life had been like before Mary died. Before Mary was murdered. Sam literally had no idea what life was like outside of the hunt, so why was he constantly fighting it? Had the things that had reached out for him so often in his early life put thoughts in his head? Was that the problem?

The door to the room the boys were using as a bedroom opened. They called it a bedroom. Who knew what it had been originally? It wasn’t like there were actual beds inside. They unrolled bedrolls in there. Maybe it was a kitchen. Maybe it was the dining room. Maybe it was a swinging bar with a secret passage down to a fully consensual sex torture dungeon, who knew? Sam walked out, bags stuffed. “Where do you think you’re going?” John demanded, rising to his feet. Like he didn’t know. He’d known this day was coming for a while now.

“California,” the kid replied like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and in a way it kind of was. “Palo Alto, remember? Stanford?” Just because John knew, just because John had been warned back in March, didn’t mean he was prepared for the rupture now. He’d warned him of all the consequences and he hadn’t said anything. He thought the boy might have made the right decision. Here he stood though, bags in hand like he hadn’t actually given any thought to another outcome.

Rage flowed through John’s veins, kept in check by the pallor suddenly coming over his older son’s features. “The hell you are, boy. We’re in the middle of a hunt.” Dean rose to his feet but stayed silent.

“No. You’re at the beginning of a hunt, not in the middle. And I told you about this back in friggin’ March. This can’t be a surprise for you.” His voice was perfectly calm. For a moment, half a second, John was reminded of another leave-taking. There was a (shorter but still slender) man in a suit and coat coming into his bedroom, the light glinting off an unusual tie tack. 

Fortunately Dean interrupted before the older man’s temper got away from him. “No, but I figured you’d come to your senses. You, at Stanford? Come on, Sammy,” the younger man scoffed. “I mean, first of all, how do you think you’re going to pay for that? I mean, sure, you do a fine job covering our trails on the credit card scams and everything but really –“

“I got a scholarship. Full ride. Tuition, room and board, books, laptop. Everything. All I have to do is get myself there.” John should have been proud, and he knew it. A normal father would have been proud because even though John didn’t pay attention to the trappings of the middle class and their status symbols he knew that this was a big deal. A full ride anywhere was impressive. Getting accepted to one of the top-tier schools in the country – in the world – was impressive. The combination should have had him bursting at the seams, calling everyone he knew. When had he become the kind of man that only got angry at news like this?

And when had his son turned into the kind of man that only shared this kind of news the night before he decamped for the school involved? 

“What the hell makes you think you deserve a full ride to a place like Stanford?” he snorted. It was an assy thing to say, and he knew it. He was desperate. He had one chance to keep Sam here and he knew it. “You have a job to do, boy, and it doesn’t involve sitting around on a beach reading books all day. Your place is here, getting revenge for your mother. Or did you forget about her? Are you too selfish to do right by the woman who gave you life?” It would have worked with Dean. It wouldn’t have had to work with Dean.

“I never actually knew her, so I can’t really say, but do you really think that this is what she’d want for us? For me, for Dean? Falling-down shacks we can’t stay in if the wind picks up? Getting shot at and tossed across –“ For such a smart kid he sure made a tactical error there. John’s fist connected with his face before he even knew he was swinging. He hated that about himself, the tendency to lash out at his kids. They needed the discipline, sure, but sometimes he wondered if he weren’t going a little too far. Was it discipline if he wasn’t controlled himself? His own knuckles split a little under the impact – Sam’s cheekbones were sharp just like the edges of his mind. The kid’s eye began to bruise immediately and he’d hit hard enough to break the skin. The boy nodded once, putting down his bags. For a moment, just half a second, John hoped that he’d gained his point and kept the family together. Then Sam’s fist shot out and caught him in the jaw, just under his right ear. Lightning-fast, the fist sprang back to defend his face while the other hand came around to slam against the right side of his head. 

Two things occurred to John as he staggered back. The first was that Sam was not a boy. He was younger than John, younger by quite a lot, but that no longer meant much because the man had been fighting since he could walk. He’d been fighting dirty since he could walk too, since he’d been pretty puny until about a year and a half ago. The second thing was that Sam had indeed grown quite a bit in that year and a half, and while he was still skinny as hell (because he wouldn’t eat) he packed one hell of a punch. Two, technically. The little shit had been pulling his punches when they sparred. Of course this wasn’t the first time they’d tangled. John gave him two good shots to the chest that he was sure cracked ribs but the kid didn’t even grunt. He just leaned back a little on one of those mile-long legs, pulled the other one up and used the other to launch him into the wall at about a thousand miles per hour. That absolutely cracked ribs – John’s ribs, both from the impact of Sam’s steel-soled boot and from his close encounter with the wall. Bits of that wall crashed down onto his head on impact, sending him to the ground in a daze. He had a Winchester’s thick skull so he wasn’t knocked out but he couldn’t quite rise to his feet. “You selfish piece of garbage,” the veteran spat out through the dust coating his face. “Does your family really mean that little to you, that you think you get to just walk away from our job? Our mission?” He wasn’t thinking anymore, just screaming. Later, when the rage and fury made room for liquor and regret, he’d recognize that this wasn’t exactly encouraging reconciliation. Right now, though, reconciliation couldn’t have been further from his mind.

Reconciliation didn’t seem to exactly be at the top of Sam’s to-do list either. “They’re your job,” he retorted. His voice was even and calm but the veins in his neck stood out like cords. “Your mission. I was six months old when you took this crap show on the road. I never enlisted in your stupid army and I’m not a god damned soldier.”

“You were a piss-poor soldier at any rate. Absolute crap at following orders,” John grunted, trying to get to his feet and failing. He hated the fact that Dean was watching this, seeing him thus humiliated. What must be going through his good son’s head? 

The prodigal advanced on his father now, eyes so darkened with rage and hate that they appeared almost black. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly. “Families don’t have orders and chains of command!” he barked. “They have bonds of love and trust and those don’t exist between us!” Those words echoed in John’s brain. It would take an awful lot of whiskey to wash them away, probably more than they had on hand. He grabbed his bags and turned to his brother. His eyes looked a lot lighter when he looked in that direction. “Dean, I’d love it if you came with me. You know you can do so much better than this –“ 

Dean’s face turned from incredulous to disgusted. “Better than this, Sammy? Are you kidding me? Better than saving people? Better than hunting down all the evil, supernatural sons of bitches out there and killing them? Better than finding what killed Mom and giving it what’s coming to it? Boy I just don’t get that.” His hands balled into fists.

“All right. Well, I’ll see you around, Dean.” He nodded a couple of times, like he hadn’t really expected him to say yes. Then he turned his back completely and walked toward the door. 

Dean turned his back on his brother, only watching John as the paterfamilias staggered halfway to his feet. Sam had knocked out two of his teeth but there was no way he was going to let either son know that. “You walk out that door don’t you ever come back, you hear me?” John Winchester yelled at his son. “Don’t you ever come back!”

Mary’s last gift to him paused for half a second before making his exit. He didn’t even give them the satisfaction of a good slam of the door, just let it close quietly behind him.

Dean 

Dean was reading. He wasn’t reading anything particularly intense – not Sammy-type reading. Kid was always reading these giant freaking books that would double as offensive weapons, and what was the point of that? They just made extra weight. He was done with school, long past when he should have been done with school in Dean’s opinion. What was the point of a diploma in their line of work? Especially when he’d insisted on all the extra classes, Advanced Placement and all that crap like it was going to do him any damn good. Who cared about credit hours when a rougarou was breathing down your neck? The farmhouse wasn’t much of a place but it didn’t have to be. So what if the roof was falling in? The walls would hold for another week or two, and so would the second floor. That’s all they needed. Now that Sammy was done with his stupid school or whatever that’s all they needed, a few days here, a week there and on to the next place. Sammy used to whine about that. Not when Dad could hear – not often anyway. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he used to ask. “Doesn’t it bother you that we don’t have a place? A home? That we’re not part of anyplace?”

“No,” he always told him, and he hadn’t been lying. Really, he hadn’t. “I’ve lived more, done more in my (sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two) years than most of those people will do in their entire lives. And the fact I’m out there doing what I do means that they have their lives to do it in.”

“But… you’re going to die before you’re even thirty, Dean. You’re never going to have a home, you’re never going to have a family of your own. Kids, a wife. Do you seriously want to be under Dad’s thumb for the rest of your life?”

And he’d always looked right back at his little brother and said, “It’s not even like that, Sammy. Not for me and not for you. We do what we have to. It’s our job. We follow our orders and we just have to trust that Dad knows what he’s talking about.”

And that really was what it was all about. Sammy’d never really gotten it, but he’d come around. Maybe he’d never really get the “why” the way Dean did. He’d never known Mom. He would never know what it was like to have a homemade pie for lunch, made just for him for no reason other than the fact that someone loved him just that much. He’d never know what it was like to get tucked in with a warm, loving kiss and a soft hand caressing his face. Hell, he’d probably never even have someone hug him and say “I love you,” just because. It had been almost nineteen years since Mom died and Dean was only barely able to remember her face, but he remembered the kisses and the hugs and the bed-tucks and the pies and the lunches and the love. Those were the reasons he kept fighting, and it was okay if Sam didn’t get those, because he’d never have them ripped away in a ball of fire either. 

But Sammy had gotten easier over the past few months – just stopped pushing back about so much, and thank God – or whatever – for that. He’d spouted some nonsense back then about going to college and Dean had come really close to beating that crap right out of him before Dad had intervened. It was one thing to fight about it and be a whiny little bitch, because that was Sammy, right? But it was something else to threaten to leave, to go off and be Johnny Normal because he thought he was so much better than his family. Better than their fucking job. But Dad had stepped in, and he had laid down the law. There would be no college at all, certainly not any snooty, white-shoe place like Stanford. Dad made that real clear. Sam had heard him out and he’d bitched, and then he went through one of those emo girl phases where he just shut down and didn’t freaking talk to anyone at all for days and days, geez it was like the kid thought he was being punished for freaking existing or something, and then he didn’t mention it again. He tried not to make waves, and he did his best to make Dean happy and he tried to stay out of their father’s way and that was as close to peace as their family had even had since Mom died so Dean would take it. 

It was all in how you dealt with Sammy. Dad had no idea how to do it. Sammy was a thinker, and Dad didn’t know how to deal with that. Dad had been a Marine and Marines liked a clear-cut chain of command. In the family the chain of command was Dad, then Dean and that was how it was always going to be. Dean was okay with it but he understood that a guy like Sammy wasn’t necessarily on board. The thing was to give him a little slack. Let him think he was getting his way with little things and he’d give in with the bigger things.

Of course, Dean had Sammy’s trust. Dean knew that Sammy was smart, that Sammy knew things about things because he was a great big nerd and he researched all kinds of freaky things for fun and then he remembered them. He’d probably forgotten more lore than either John or Dean remembered and he was only nineteen and only doing this grudgingly. John, John would never have Sammy’s trust. Dean tried to tell him that, and his response was to shout at the kid that he had to trust him because that’s how soldiers worked. He couldn’t, you know, prove himself to his son, because that meant trusting Sammy, and John could no more trust Sammy than he could lick his own elbow.

But whatever. The family was at peace, and that was what mattered. It wasn’t like the kid was going to leave. Where would he go? Going off on his own was not an option. He knew what was out there. The kid was good, but he couldn’t face it alone. No way in Hell. Half the fights Dean had been in had been about Sammy, at least the early ones. Before he was ten anyway. Fighting to save him from… things. Fighting to save him from other hunters. It wasn’t like Dad kept them moving around like this for fun. The kid would figure it out eventually, reconcile himself to his life and his place in it. Until then, he needed to get the stick out of his ass and lighten up. Maybe the next time Dad left he’d take him out to a bar and finally get him laid. Was Sammy actually interested in girls? He’d never expressed interest in sex one way or another, but if he was into guys he was way too smart to say anything in front of Dad. Either way, the kid needed to blow off some steam and it was well past time for him. Dad was opposed. It wasn’t like they talked about that kind of thing, not really, but the subject had come up in a roundabout kind of way and John had been pretty firm on the subject. “It’s best if he just keeps to himself in that way,” he’d said. Dean was generally a good soldier and a good son, but that was in no way shape or form healthy. Especially since Dad had encouraged his proclivities since he’d been in junior high. 

His curious musing about his brother’s presumably non-existent sex life was interrupted by the emergence of said brother from the room they shared. Dean could tell immediately that something was wrong. It was the tail end of August in Utah and the kid was wearing three layers. Sammy burned hot. The kid was like a furnace. Why would he possibly be wearing so many layers? His boots were on too, and usually he liked to go barefoot when their dad was around to make less noise and attract less attention. His eyes had a glint in them, and his jaw had a set to it that Dean recognized. It was the glint that it got when Sammy had no intention of moving. 

Of course, another sign of danger was the fact that Sammy stood there with his bags packed.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Dad demanded, rising to his feet. He’d been reading the obituary section of the local newspaper, researching for the hunt that had brought them to scenic Utah in the first place. 

“California,” the kid replied like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and Dean’s blood ran cold. “Palo Alto, remember? Stanford?”

Dean’s brain flashed back. “Dean, Dad, I got my acceptance letters back. I got into Harvard, Princeton, U. Chicago and Stanford. They’re all good schools but I’ve decided that Stanford is really the one for me and I’m going there in the fall.” Right. That nonsense. He’d thought they were done with that, because it was all crap, right? But if it was crap, why did he feel so incredibly numb right now? 

He rose to his feet and opened his mouth, but his father found his words before Dean could find his own. “The hell you are, boy. We’re in the middle of a hunt.”

“No. You’re at the beginning of a hunt, not in the middle. And I told you about this back in friggin’ March. This can’t be a surprise for you.” His voice was perfectly calm and his eyes met John’s squarely. 

Oh God, Sammy, Dean thought. You know you can’t challenge Dad directly like that. What the hell are you thinking? “No, but I figured you’d come to your senses. You, at Stanford? Come on, Sammy,” the younger man scoffed. “I mean, first of all, how do you think you’re going to pay for that? I mean, sure, you do a fine job covering our trails on the credit card scams and everything but really –“ He could see their father’s face turning red. The guy was sober. Was that better or worse? 

“I got a scholarship. Full ride. Tuition, room and board, books, laptop. Everything. All I have to do is get myself there.” Well, hell. A full ride? Those were for geniuses. Like, full-on geniuses. Brain-in-wheelchair geniuses. Solve-world-hunger geniuses. Nobel-Prize-winning geniuses. Not white trash nomads who should have criminal records but were too smart to get caught. 

Could Dean have gotten a full ride somewhere too? Maybe? 

“What the hell makes you think you deserve a full ride to a place like Stanford?” the old man snorted. “You have a job to do, boy, and it doesn’t involve sitting around on a beach reading books all day. Your place is here, getting revenge for your mother. Or did you forget about her? Are you too selfish to do right by the woman who gave you life?”

Dean immediately felt guilty just for having thought about maybe having gone to college. It was wrong. This was the only life he could ever have had, he was born to this, and so was Sammy damn it. Dad was right. The kid was spoiled, and that was on Dean. Dean had given him too much leeway, let him get so caught up in himself that he couldn’t see the important thing here: Mom, burning in his nursery. Probably burning to save his sorry ass. And he thought he deserved to go to college? Screw him.

“I never actually knew her, so I can’t really say, but do you really think that this is what she’d want for us? For me, for Dean? Falling-down shacks we can’t stay in if the wind picks up? Getting shot at and tossed across –“ He wished he could feel bad for his brother, because that was going to be one hell of a shiner. The kid deserved it though. Rule number one in the Winchester family was that you didn’t talk about Mom, you didn’t even open your mouth and breathe that word. If you even thought about it you were going to get a walloping and he had that one coming, especially if the brat was going to invoke her name in trying to get away with abandoning his family here. This should do it though. This should beat some sense back into Sam, and he’d sulk for a few days but he’d get over it and they’d fall right back into their rightful places. Right?

Wrong. Sammy just put his bags down on the floor and nodded once, like checking something off on a goddamn checklist. It was like he hadn’t even noticed that John freaking Winchester had just punched him in the face, and Dean knew entirely too well that John could hit like a truck. Apparently Sammy could too, because he just popped him in the face like it was nothing. He got him in the jaw right under the ear and followed it up with another blow to the side of the head, a combo that set the older man to reeling. When had Sammy learned to hit like that? And since when did Sammy hit back? The kid could fight, sure. Dean knew that. He’d seen Sammy fight at school when dealing with bullies, and in bars when dealing with townies, and in fights dealing with fuglies of all sorts. He’d never fought back against his own kin, though, just taken his discipline like he should. The sheer shock factor kept Dean rooted to the spot, jaw slackened instead of going in to help his father the way he knew he should.

Dad was staggering but he was way too experienced a fighter to not know how to play through the pain. He got two really good punches in against Sammy’s chest. If the kid would eat something he’d have been better able to absorb the blows but Dean knew damn well that you could count the boy’s ribs through his skin. Those would hurt and if they didn’t crack something Dean would eat his own shoe. But Sammy – hazel eyes icy and resolute – didn’t even grunt as he drew one foot up and connected it solidly with his father’s ribcage. Where the hell had that come from? He never kicked in sparring practice – probably saving it for sometime when he actually had to use it against his family. He gaped as his father flew back into the wall, falling into a dazed heap of drywall dust and plaster. “You selfish piece of garbage,” the veteran spat out through the dust coating his face. “Does your family really mean that little to you, that you think you get to just walk away from our job? Our mission?” Dean felt his own expression turn from anger to dismay. That was not going to keep Sammy here, far from it. 

“They’re your job,” Sammy retorted. His voice was even and calm but the veins in his neck stood out like cords. “Your mission. I was six months old when you took this crap show on the road. I never enlisted in your stupid army and I’m not a god damned soldier.”

“You were a piss-poor soldier at any rate. Absolute crap at following orders,” John grunted, trying to get to his feet and failing.

Now Sam did advance on his father, and Dean felt real fear. “Families don’t have orders and chains of command!” he barked. “They have bonds of love and trust and those don’t exist between us!” Wait – what? He knew Sammy didn’t exactly have a lot of trust for their dad, but he’d always thought the kid loved and trusted him. Well, he was part of the family, and if Sammy didn’t trust the family then he didn’t trust or love Dean either. That probably wasn’t what he meant, of course, but it was what he was saying and it was what he would mean if he left. “Dean, I’d love it if you came with me. You know you can do so much better than this –“ 

This was his big chance, his chance to save the family. The chance to hold everything together. To do his job. “Better than this, Sammy? Are you kidding me? Better than saving people? Better than hunting down all the evil, supernatural sons of bitches out there and killing them? Better than finding what killed Mom and giving it what’s coming to it? Boy I just don’t get that.” His hands balled into fists. Sammy had never, ever turned him down before. Not for anything.

“All right. Well, I’ll see you around, Dean.” He nodded a couple of times, like he hadn’t really expected him to say yes. Then he turned his back completely and walked toward the door.

Dean felt a lump in his throat. He turned his back so his brother wouldn’t see him cry. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. After everything they’d done for Sammy, everything he’d done for Sammy, he could not be leaving them right now. Not like this. He’d killed for Sammy. He’d murdered for Sammy. Their father had managed to half-stand up. “You walk out that door don’t you ever come back, you hear me?” John Winchester yelled at his son. “Don’t you ever come back!” Sammy didn’t even turn around, he just walked away. He walked away like he was going to the goddamn store, and the door closed behind him with the loudest “click” ever heard.


	2. Wondered How Tomorrow Could Ever Follow Today

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam settles in at Stanford, while Dean and John detour to Minnesota en route to Massachusetts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is no direct John voice in this chapter. He'll be back in the next, but I figured he was pretty numb after Sam left and didn't have much to actually say.

Sam

He looked around the room. It wasn’t large, and the amount of stuff that the university had seen fit to put in it made it seem even smaller. There was the bed. There was the dresser with its built-in mirror. There was the wardrobe, which he supposed passed as a closet. There was a desk, with a bunch of shelves bracketed to the wall over it. There was a small refrigerator, with a microwave attached to it. The walls were narrow and they were beige. The curtains were beige, with some kind of light-blocking liner. He might have thought that cinderblock walls would be more sound absorptive but apparently he’d have been wrong. All around him he could hear the sounds of young men (or, more often, their parents) expressing dismay about the sizes of the rooms. He was pretty sure that since he was in a single he was getting the short end of the stick size-wise and he frankly had nothing to complain about. Maybe he just had different standards. Right now the place seemed palatial.

He’d checked into the dorm as soon as he got to campus – not that getting there was easy or fun, between transferring busses and cracked ribs. His father’s parting gift had earned him no few glances, and he supposed that forty-eight straight hours on public transportation hadn’t done him any favors. As soon as he could put his things down he went straight back out to the bookstore and purchased sheets sized appropriately for the bed – a bed long enough that he could actually fit lengthwise, for the first time since his growth spurt! – and the rest of the supplies he needed. Then he went back to his room and made use of the shower.

Such showers! There was no mold. There were no stains. They just about sparkled. And it did not matter how long he stayed in there, the hot water never ran out and no one came to tell him to “hurry it up in there Sammy, people are dying.” He could scrub and scrub until his skin was not just pink but red and no one would care. He dressed and went back to his room – his own room! Such privacy! Such luxury! – and unpacked. He’d never really unpacked before. It had never been an option. He knew it was what people did, though. He put clothes in drawers, neatly folded. He hung clothes in the wardrobe. The threadbare shirts looked a little ridiculous hanging there on plastic hangars like dressy things, but hey – maybe someday he’d have something to hang beside them, and at least now his shirts didn’t need to look like they’d been wadded up in a duffel bag.

Now for the books. It made the most sense for his schoolbooks to be on the bottom shelf. Should they be organized by author, by course, by descending order of height? So many options… And what about his personal books? How should they be organized? Language? Subject? Area of his life that he wanted to leave behind him? He had time before the floor meeting to check out the cafeteria.

That was new too and he knew even before he got three steps in the door that this was going to take some getting used to. He was an old hand at all-you-can-eat places. Every craphole between the Atlantic and the Pacific had them, with their “early bird specials” and their “kids eat free” deals. They were wretched affairs, with overcooked cabbage and deep-fried everything and vegetables that probably hadn’t seen a farm since Khrushchev’s shoe was walking around on four legs. Even their salad bars were suspicious and dripping with butter. This, though, this was something else. They had a grill station with burgers and hot dogs and tofu dogs – they actually accommodated vegetarians here, didn’t tell them to suck it up and eat what was put in front of them because there was no room for wimps in this army. There was a station for more substantial entrees – stick-to-your-ribs stuff that filled Sam with images of the cracks in his ribs getting spackled with mashed potatoes. He skipped that. There was a deli station for people more interested in sandwich-type things, and a pizza station, and the most amazing salad bar Sam had ever encountered in his life. The vegetables still had crispness. They had protein options to accompany them too, both vegetarian sources and non-vegetarian sources and he almost forgot to build a salad he got so lost in staring at them. Eventually he remembered himself, fixed himself the biggest salad seen this side of the Mississippi and went and sat down. He knew he was getting stared at but shrugged it off. Thirteen years of being the new kid in hand-me-downs and bruises had given him a certain immunity.

After dinner he went back to his room, checked his salt lines (set in glue - this was going to be his home for the whole year, after all) and picked up his phone. He’d gotten a new one, not expecting John to keep him on the family plan when he’d been expelled from the family. He dialed Dean’s number. It went straight to voice mail after one ring. Well, that wasn’t too weird. It wasn’t like he was expecting to get a call from this number. “Hey, Dean, it’s Sam. I wanted to let you know that I got to Stanford okay, got settled into my room and everything. It’s nice here, wish you were here to see it. You’d like it. Lots of pretty girls. Anyway, I wanted to make sure you had my new phone number in case you needed anything, so, this is it. Give me a call.” He hung up.

His next call was to Pastor Jim, who likewise didn’t pick up. “Hi, Pastor Jim. It’s Sam Winchester, I just arrived at Stanford. I’m sure you already know how that went. Anyway, I wanted to make sure that you knew how to reach me in case… just in case, you know, so this is my new phone number. And, uh, I need to have a second emergency contact besides Dean so I hope you don’t mind if I give them your number. Anyway, I hope things are going okay for you. Talk to you soon.” He had a couple of hours to kill so he grabbed one of his books off the shelf. His Legal System 101 professor had assigned reading to be done before the first lecture and he really didn’t want to get started on the wrong foot. It was a weeder class, designed to convince people to choose another major. Sam was determined to not be one of the ones frightened away. The sun began to sink and before he knew it he heard the unmistakable sound of young men moving en masse down the hall. The clock told him it was time to join them.

The floor was set up on an “H” structure. The elevators opened up onto the common room and long hallways separated off each end. Men were housed in one direction and women in the other. Cheap couches added questionable comfort, as did a television bolted to the wall and some coffee pots on a counter. An upperclasswoman, identified as such by her bearing, sat on one of the couches as students converged from the wings. Sam’s eyes were drawn to her immediately. Her skin was possibly the darkest he’d ever seen, and her natural hair was pushed back slightly from her face by a pink scarf. Elegant features housed two of the most brilliant eyes he’d ever seen. She seemed to be taking a count, confirmed by checking a clipboard. “Hi, everyone,” she greeted when she seemed to have achieved some kind of critical mass. The whispering and muttering stopped. “My name is Meli. I’m your RA. I work for Residence Life to facilitate a positive experience for everyone living in the dorms. Yes, you’re all adults. You’re all adults living on your own for the first time in fairly close quarters and that means that there are rules that we all have to agree to follow. I’m bound by those rules too, okay? I’m a student here just like you.

“This meeting is to get to know each other, break the ice, set up expectations, that sort of thing.” Great, Sam thought. It was the “new kid” ritual all over again. At least everyone was going through it. “I’ll be handing out copies of the Student Life handbook. You’re bright enough to read the rules and regulations for yourselves. You’re Stanford students, for crying out loud.” There was an arrogant little twitter from the assemblage. “Basically, the biggest thing to remember is that if it’s illegal in the state of California it’s against ResLife regulations. If you are under twenty-one it is illegal to consume alcohol in the state of California. Guess what? That means you can’t be guzzling a case of cheap beer in your dorm room. A bag of weed is illegal, so you can’t have it in the dorms. You get the idea? Don’t throw things out the windows. Don’t throw each other out the windows. Don’t rape. Don’t commit other kinds of assault. Try to keep the murder to a minimum. “All right, let’s go around and introduce ourselves, okay? We’ll do name, zodiac sign, hometown, prospective major and something interesting about ourselves. I’ll start. I’m Melisende Allen but you can call me Meli. I’m a Sagittarius, I hail from beautiful New Orleans, Louisiana, I’m pre-med, and I’ve never been to a rock concert.” Sam listened as his neighbors for the next eight months went around and described themselves. He watched, too. They all seemed so confident, even the ones for whom English was clearly not a first language. It was easy to tell which ones were roommates – they already stuck together, like it was the most natural thing in the world. He supposed that it was. They probably wouldn’t know anyone else either. Even if by some weird twist of fate two kids from the same school did wind up at Stanford the school would have made an extra effort to put them on separate floors, right? They came from all over, but mostly from the western half of the country. A lot of them had traveled. They mostly dressed well or at least expensively. None of them had shiners. None of them moved with the stiffness of fractured ribs. He knew he was already getting stared at.

When his turn came he almost froze, but he was going to be a lawyer right? Lawyers couldn’t freeze in public. “I’m Sam Winchester,” he said in a clear voice. “I’m a Taurus. I don’t really have a hometown. I’m double-majoring in pre-law and theology and there is not a single one of the lower forty-eight states in which I have not lived.” People stared. Of course they did. It was weird, he was weird.

Finally one of the girls – he thought her name was Ginny? – spoke. “Do you have a favorite?”

He blinked. No one had asked questions of anyone else during this ridiculous little game. “Well, ah, Massachusetts is best for just really weird things, you know? You can always find something to do, something to kind of grab your interest there. But in general I like California best. The weather here is best, the people are nicest and you have actual vegetables here.” People relaxed and laughed a little. That hadn’t been awful. They moved on to the next victim and he got to relax just a little. Paperwork was handed out and people disappeared back to their rooms.

He sat down at his desk to attend to said paperwork when someone knocked. That someone turned out to be the RA, Meli. “Uh, hi,” he greeted as she walked right into the room and closed the door. “Is something wrong?”

“You tell me,” she retorted. “Are you any relation to John Winchester?”

Of course. Of course Dad would find some way of screwing this up for him. “Technically yes,” he replied, backing up and holding his hands up in what he hoped was a pacifying gesture. “He’s my father.”

“Technically? What the hell is that supposed to mean? And where is he right now?” Those brilliant eyes burned.

“Right now? I couldn’t say. The last time I saw him he was outside of Cedar City, Utah. That was two days ago.”

“He didn’t bring you here?” She raised one elegant eyebrow.

“He was… differently supportive of my decision to embrace the academic lifestyle.” He gestured toward his black eye. “How do you know him?”

“I haven’t met him personally but he’s had some run-ins with my family. Do you hunt?”

“I came here to get away from hunting. He forced me and my brother to be hunters from the time I was six months old. I’ve never wanted to be a hunter. I still don’t. I want to be safe, that’s all. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” He put his hands down. Part of him was really curious as to why his RA’s family would have had a run-in with his dad. She didn’t look like a creature but he knew from experience that there were all sorts of creatures that could pass for human. Look at Amy. Hell, look at him. Besides, you didn’t have to be a freak to run afoul of John Winchester. Again, see Exhibit B. “Look, Meli. I’m not going looking for trouble. The opposite, really. And there’s no way Dad’s going to come looking for me. They’ve washed their hands of me completely, I’m by myself. Whatever it is that you think they might be coming after you for, they aren’t going to find you through me. I swear.”

She relaxed a little, although she was still suspicious. “Why should I believe you?”

“How many hunters’ kids go to college? I’m telling you, if I see them it’s not going to be for a touching family reunion. You’ll be the first person I call, probably because I’ll need someone to call campus police.” It hurt to admit but then again, his ribs hurt too. He kept his voice low and even, not panicked and not desperate even if “desperate” was really the most apt term here.

She glanced around herself. “So how exactly did you score the single, anyway? Usually it’s the sophomores who get them in these dorms.” Her shoulders had relaxed and the hate had disappeared from her eyes. He’d won, at least for now.

“Just lucky I guess.” He shrugged. Luck had nothing to do with it, of course. He’d been very careful and very meticulous and very certain in his intrusion into the university housing system. He’d been tempted to go for the Full College Experience and take his chances with the roommate, but who was he kidding? Maybe the kid wouldn’t screw up the salt lines. Maybe he could keep the guns and knives and crap hidden. He didn’t think he’d manage to hide the nightmares, though, and a visit from student counseling services because he screamed in Latin in his sleep was not high on his to-do list. And if the kid was a classical scholar, or a theology major, or just spoke freaking Latin – well, a trip to a psych ward was not a part of Sam’s long-term plans.

“Probably not a bad stroke of luck for a hunter’s kid to have.” She gave him a little smile. “Let me know if you have any problems, Sam.” She walked away.

Dean

Dad sank back to the ground after Sammy walked out the door. It was like a switch had been flipped, or maybe someone had rebooted him or something. Well that made sense. It wasn’t like either of them had ever openly defied the guy before. He and Sammy had come to blows before but never like this. The kid had never put up more than token defense and John hadn’t really expected him to. This was well beyond token. Dad was bleeding from his damn mouth. “Get your things, Dean,” he grunted when those terrible ten minutes of silence were over.

“We’re going after him, right Dad?” the blond asked eagerly. “I mean, we’re not going to just let him get away with this, are we?”

“What do you want to do, Dean, truss him up like a pig and stick him in the trunk for the rest of his life?” the older man snapped.

“Well, I mean, if we can make him miss that Stanford deadline then he won’t have anywhere else to go,” he reasoned. “He’ll see he has to stay with us, he needs us.”

“It’s too late for that, son. Sam’s dead to us. It’s just you and me now.”

The pit grew in Dean’s gut. “Dad –“

“Did I just speak English? Sam. Is. Dead. As far as I am concerned there is no Sam. You are never to mention his name in my presence again.” He exhaled. “We’re better off without him anyway. He held us back, Dean. All that complaining, all that whining, all that constant questioning and challenging. Without him we’ll be a well-oiled machine.”

Dean opened his mouth to object. Sammy hadn’t done much complaining or whining in the past five months. Granted, that was because he was planning to take off all along and just hadn’t made an issue of it. And it would be easier to work and get the job done without having to run interference between him and Dad. “Yes, sir.” Dad knew best.

He went into the bedroom and collected his things, which had been scattered around the place already. They hadn’t been here long, of course. Only a few hours but already the place had become Dean’s, and now they were leaving again. Sammy, of course, had left no trace except his bedroll. Dean considered leaving it behind, but the extra blankets and pillow would come in handy. They piled into their respective vehicles and pulled out onto the road.

John took the lead. John always took the lead and that was okay. Dean wouldn’t expect anything less. John knew what he was doing. The guy was the best hunter to have ever walked the Earth. If he was heading East then East was where people needed saving. “This is the life, huh Sammy?” he asked the ghost in the passenger seat, who flipped him off and leaned against the window, sulking.

They pulled into a drive-through for coffee, and after about six hours they stopped for gas. Dean was grateful. “So, what’s the plan, Dad?” he asked.

“I figure it’s about three days to Massachusetts,” the older man informed him. “We might be able to do it in less but I’m a little beat up. I thought we might take a little longer to wind our way there, maybe work up some extra cash. Stop for the night, maybe you could tape my ribs up or something.”

“Night” was a euphemism, it was getting close to sunrise. “Yes, sir.” Massachusetts was the opposite direction of where he wanted to be. It was about as far from California, from Stanford, as he could get. How the hell was he supposed to protect Sammy from Massachusetts? Of course, protecting Sammy wasn’t his job anymore. He’d failed at that, he’d failed so spectacularly that he’d chased Sammy away and now he was dead to them.

He put gas into both vehicles while John found them a motel. The motel was seedy but so were they, and that was all right. They didn’t have to try to find a rollaway bed and no one had to make do with the floor. That should be good, right? He should feel good about not having to sleep on a questionable floor and he should feel good about not feeling guilty about his little brother sleeping on the floor because he was hurt too badly to take the floor so his brother could have the bed. He could sleep in the bed and not feel bad. Why then did he feel, well, bad? And where was Sammy? Was he sleeping? Was he hurt? Was he on the bus? Did the bus smell? Was it dirty? He knew the kid was downright phobic about dirt.

The next morning Dad called Pastor Jim and told him where they were headed. Dean headed out and got them breakfast. Someone had to do it – Dad was as likely to forget to eat as not, and Dean didn’t want to overhear that conversation. He didn’t need to have his own failures thrown back in his face. He should have kept the family together and he didn’t. That was all there was to it. Dad hadn’t made an issue of it yet but he hadn’t made an issue of much yet. He found a diner not too far away and found them food, which they ate in silence before they returned to their respective vehicles and kept driving. There was a slight detour in their plans in that they circled up toward Minnesota to visit with their pastor friend. Even that drive took a good three days – he guessed Sammy had beat Dad up worse than he’d thought. That gave him a little surge of pride, not that he could share that with anyone. It was okay, though.

They found a bar and hustled a little pool to drum up some cash – it wasn’t as though Sammy was going to be around to cover their traces on the credit card scams anymore. They did pretty well for themselves – made a good thousand dollars between them before deciding to get out while the getting was good. The next day was just a long stretch of highway, unpunctuated by more than a couple of coffee and gas breaks. He’d done this before of course but he almost always had backup – someone, if not Sammy, by his side. Caleb, or Pastor Jim, anyone. Some other hunter. He hated the monotony of these long drives alone in the car with his own thoughts. He needed to get used to them now. They made it to their next layover, where they lathered, rinsed and repeated their experience from the previous night. The bartender had been a very attractive, tall, dark-haired young thing whose signals had indicated that she was more than willing to entertain after hours but Dean declined. His heart wasn’t in it. He was reluctant to leave Dad alone right now. Sammy had done a lot of damage, even if the guy didn’t want to show it, and Dean couldn’t really leave him in good conscience. Besides, there was something about her youth, her height, the set of her hazel eyes above that pert little nose that reminded him a little too much of the brother he had lost for him to be comfortable.

He got a call from an unfamiliar number while he was at a bar and sent it straight to voice mail. He checked when they got back to the motel and he wasn’t terribly surprised to find that it was from Sammy. “Hey, Dean, it’s Sam. I wanted to let you know that I got to Stanford okay, got settled into my room and everything. It’s nice here, wish you were here to see it. You’d like it. Lots of pretty girls. Anyway, I wanted to make sure you had my new phone number in case you needed anything, so, this is it. Give me a call.” He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. An apology? Sorry for abandoning you? Sorry for walking out on our family’s entire reason for existing? Sorry for ditching everything that has ever been important to you? Sorry for turning my back on everything that you’ve ever done for me? An admission, maybe? An admission that normal was just more than he could actually handle, and he was wrong, and that this college crap wasn’t what he was born for? Fear, maybe? An acknowledgement that he wasn’t safe in the bright shiny world of normal, that just because people pretended that the things that went bump in the night weren’t there didn’t mean that they weren’t going to eat them and that he needed his god damn big brother to take care of him and keep him safe? Whatever Dean had expected it wasn’t this – this bland, innocuous, untroubled message.

He’d made it. Against all odds he’d made it to Stanford by himself on public transportation. Any of the people on that bus – those busses, because he’d have had to transfer at least once – could have been among the creatures that had been trying to collect him for whatever freakish purpose they’d had in mind since he’d been a little kid. Didn’t he get that? Didn’t he remember that? Or maybe they might have been one of the hunters, people like their father but without his integrity and good sense. Did he not remember the guy with the Cadillac? The guy Dean had killed for him when Dean was only twelve? All that had died down after Sammy had turned, what, eight or something but that didn’t mean it couldn’t boil back up. It had died down because Dad kept them safe and hidden. But now Sam just sauntered out into the open like a giant beacon practically shouting, “Here I am! Come get me! Tasty eats right here!” And he’d made it. He shouldn’t have. He should have been picked up by the fuglies that were around every corner, lurking in every shadow but instead he’d trudged along in a crowded, nasty sardine can on wheels that against all odds didn’t have a single ghost or demon or ghoul or what-have-you on it all by himself. He’d gotten checked into the school all by himself. He’d gotten his room set up all by himself. Had he remembered to set up the salt lines? Dean wanted to say that he would have forgotten them, that he would have skipped them in an act of rebellion and wallowed in their normalcy but he knew better. They’d have been the first thing Sammy would have done if he could have figured out a way to do it without the roomie finding out. He had clean sheets on his bed. He had a bed, his own bed, and the son of a – well, he couldn’t use that term, not for Sammy, or at least not for Sammy’s mother, but Sammy would get to keep that bed for eight whole months or whatever a school year was when you were in college. Bastard.

He deleted the message. He saved the number, though. Just in case.

The next day Dad pushed hard and they made it to the rectory. The priest welcomed them with open arms and his typically open heart. Dean always found it kind of funny that they spent so much time in the company of a priest considering that they had never been Catholic and Dad hadn’t even bothered to get Sammy baptized but what the Hell – Pastor Jim was a friend, one of the few John Winchester had left, and he’d take what he could get. It was late when they rolled in but Jim had bowls of pasta waiting for them, pasta and fresh clean beds.

Being here at all was kind of bittersweet. Dean loved Pastor Jim. He knew that the cleric had asked them to come to Minnesota not out of any personal need or for any professional reason but because he wanted to offer comfort to the remaining Winchesters in their grief and that was all. He also knew that Jim himself would be grieving – he’d always been fond of Sammy, “gotten” him in a way that neither father nor brother really could. If Dad would have just let Sammy stay with Jim maybe this whole thing wouldn’t have happened… of course, that would have defeated the whole purpose of keeping the family together, wouldn’t it?

And then there was the dissonance. This parish, this rectory had been Sam’s favorite place to come back to. Dean couldn’t walk into the empty sanctuary without seeing the outline of an eleven-year-old Sammy on the floor between the pews, hiding from Dad with a book and reading in the shadow of the Cross. He couldn’t sit at the kitchen table and reach for a piece of toast without wanting to first put it on the suspiciously clean plate of a smaller boy in the hopes that the damn kid would eat something. And the guest room under the eaves, the one that had been his for so long that he couldn’t even remember a time when he hadn’t had to stoop to get into bed, he couldn’t even open his eyes in there without seeing an impossibly tiny form in the other ancient twin bed.

Dad seemed to need it though. He didn’t talk about it – not with Dean anyway. The bruises on his face faded a bit though, and some of the color returned to his face. The patriarch went out alone every night though, walking to one of the three bars within an appropriate distance every night. Dean was okay with that – it wasn’t like Dad drinking was anything new, and if he was walking he wasn’t driving and he knew how to get back. After a couple of days he picked up a hunt about an hour away, maybe two, with Jim. The thing turned out to be pretty simple – runaway teenaged boy, hit by a car and haunting the same stretch of road for like two months. Poor thing didn’t even know he was dead. The body hadn’t ever been found, but Dean found him. Jim explained the situation and prayed with him, and he’d said thank you. No one had even filed a missing persons report on him. That one had hit a little close to home.

It didn’t help that Sammy had called again while he’d been in the middle of things. His phone had been turned off, because he didn’t need distractions in the middle of a job, but in the privacy of his room in the rectory he listened to the message. “Hey, Dean. Just checking in. You never called me back so I’m hoping you’re okay and everything, you know, not hurt, still alive and all. Uh, school is great. I had my first classes already. I really wish you were here, you know, I saw tons of ads for auto body shops looking for help –“ There was a loud whooping sound farther away and then a girl’s voice closer to the phone. “You coming, hot stuff?” “Uh, I gotta go, man, but call me back, let me know you’re alive or something, okay?”

He deleted the message. What the hell did Sam care if he was still alive? He’d left. He’d walked away. He cared enough to leave a five second message asking if he was alive but not enough to be there with him, making sure he was still alive, guarding his back, keeping him alive. Letting Dean keep him alive. And what was up with the girl? The whooping sounds in the background? Who were those people? Who was the chick? “Hot stuff?” On the one hand – it sounded like Sam was getting laid, and it was long past time too. On the other hand – had anyone checked her to make sure she was who and what she said she was? Of course not, because he was out there on his own with no one to think of these things for him.

They stayed at Jim’s for another two days before Dad decided it was time to move on. There wasn’t anything exceptionally pressing in Massachusetts but this “Bridgewater Triangle” had been a problem for centuries or so he claimed. It wouldn’t be Dad’s first foray there; they’d be sure to find something to hunt there and that was what they needed now. A good, exciting hunt to get their heads back into the game. Dean couldn’t have agreed more. The drive would be long – another three days at their current lackadaisical pace – but that was okay. They were in no particular hurry. It wasn’t like anyone actually needed them.


	3. The Sea Was Red and the Sky Was Gray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam adds some new facets to his life but is forced to accept the loss of another. John gets some help from an old friend in recognizing some of his failures. Dean makes an important decision, and the elder Winchesters pick up a hunt.

Sam 

Sam didn’t hear back from his brother, not after the first phone call and not after the second. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. On the one hand Dad would never have let him actually call in his presence and he knew that, but how hard would it have been to sneak out into the bathroom at a bar or something and take five seconds to say, “Hey, I’m not dead, thanks for checking?” On the other hand, he’d known that this was a possibility. It was a repugnant possibility but one he’d had to account for. And who knew? Maybe John was following Dean into the bathrooms in bars now. Without Sam to follow around and micromanage maybe Dean was taking the fall – one more reason to help him get out.

He didn’t spend all his time mooning around over his brother of course. He hadn’t sliced through the apron strings to sigh over them. He’d come here to get a life and an education and by all that was holy he was going to do it. Classes started the day after his dorm meeting. Most freshmen – hell, most students – had four classes per semester. Sam had enrolled in five. His advisors had both discouraged this (remotely of course; he hadn’t been able to come to campus for summer orientation) but it wasn’t like he was good at the whole sleep thing and he knew he was going to need something to distract his brain and (frankly) his heart from the things he’d miss. He needed to be absorbed in academia, to wrap it around him like layers of flannel or maybe Kevlar. It would be the foundation of his new life, the cornerstone of the new Sam Winchester. And so he had his mandatory pre-law course, and his mandatory Introductory Theology course, and Chemistry 101 because he had a science requirement (and you never knew when you might be called upon to make something explode, so it seemed like the most useful). And because there was a language requirement he took Hebrew, because it fit in with the whole Theology thing. And hey – why not a constitutional law class too while he was at it? 

He hit the gym too. He wasn’t a hunter anymore. He wasn’t. That didn’t mean things weren’t going to find him. They’d found him all his life. Separating from his father didn’t mean that would change, it just meant life would suck less. He still ran, and he ran more now than he did with his father and brother breathing down his neck about training. Now he ran because he liked running, he liked how it cleared his mind. Meli caught him at it like the morning after they met and strongly recommended that he join an intramural soccer team and when he saw a sign-up sheet in the theology department he actually did. 

It wasn’t just the workout he was after, it was the team. It was the community, the social interaction. That was what he’d missed out on most in his screwed-up non-childhood, he knew it. His father had been militantly opposed to any kind of socialization, especially on his part. He knew if he was going to have any kind of chance at a real life he needed to figure out how to actually interact with other people. The team was a great way to do exactly that, because it gave him an automatic kind of common ground. They were all theology students so there was that, and then there was the game itself. He joined a mock trial group through the pre-law program for the same reasons. He generally liked the theology students better, although connections in both worlds were important. He was going to be a lawyer after all, not a priest.

Distinctly not a priest. His father’s objections to him socializing had been mild compared to his reactions to the idea of his interacting with the opposite sex. That didn’t mean he hadn’t met girls or anything but he’d rarely had chances to figure out what it was that he actually liked. His father had tried to give him “the sex talk” once. It had mostly consisted of a very uncomfortable variant of “keep it in your pants,” with all attendant veiled threats. At the time Sam had attributed it to whatever the hell Dad thought was wrong with him, and Dad sure as hell thought plenty was wrong with him. He’d seen it written out there at Christmastime, plain as day in the old man’s journal. Now he knew better of course. It was just part of the old man’s double standard. He didn’t want Sam getting interested in sex because it meant letting Sam grow up and be an actual independent human being, think for himself, make choices for himself.

And as long as he lived under John’s thumb and a selction of borrowed, rented and stolen roofs he’d been forced to accept that infantilization, that forced retardation of his normal development. Which wasn’t to say that he hadn’t had an interest in sex, he just couldn’t show an interest where his father could see. Or where his brother could see, because his brother might mean well but he couldn’t be trusted not to be his father’s eyes and ears. There had been Amy, the first girl he’d kissed, and it had burned like fire to send her away. Just like it had burned like fire to not explain why he couldn’t go with her – he needed to cover her tracks, he needed to make sure that his family had no idea that the kitsune they were tracking had a daughter and most importantly that they had no idea that he’d ever had feelings for her, or they’d stop at nothing to eradicate her from existence. Now though the only barriers were his own inclination and his conscience. So when Ginny showed up at his room the night after the floor meeting to complement him on his hands and invite him to put them to better use – seriously? That actually happened? – he was only worried about her ability to consent. “Uh,” he said articulately, “are you sober?”

She’d laughed. “Yes, I’m sober. We’re young, we’re away from our families for the first time and we’re attractive.” She was attractive, that was true. And she didn’t react to a brush from his silver cuff and she didn’t flinch to a whispered “Christo” so she was most likely human or at least not an evil anything, so what the hell. He was pretty sure that there was supposed to be more to it than “We’re young and attractive,” but well, maybe not. He knew what Dean would do.

It was an eye-opening experience, to put it mildly. Except for a period of time when he was too tiny to even roll over under his own power (and one furtive kiss) Sam had never experienced physical affection. He hadn’t actually known what he was missing. He still kind of felt like part of the equation was hidden but this would do quite nicely for now, and as in most things Sam learned very quickly. While she seemed reasonably content with his performance on the first pass she seemed to enjoy herself much more on the second attempt, and Sam’s own enjoyment increased with her visible and tangible pleasure. 

Ginny wasn’t looking for a long-term life companion, of course. That would have been more than a little absurd. But a friend-with-benefits situation suited him quite well, and she made sure to introduce him to her neighbors from the women’s wing. Not all of them were friendly in quite the same way as Ginny but if some of them decided that they were looking to blow off a little steam ultimately they found a willing (and apparently talented – who knew?) – accomplice in the single in the men’s wing who had the bonus of almost always being awake in the wee small hours of the morning.

His social life consisted of more than intramural sports and sex. He made friends through the teams and from the floor, and from classes. There was Harris, who could give him a run for his money when it came to research. If he wanted to stay on top of his class in his law major Harris was going to be the guy to beat. It would be easy to get hypercompetitive with each other but they found a good outlet in prank wars with Sam’s good-natured pre-med neighbor Brady. Of course having a social life meant that he had needs. His scholarship covered the basics – room and board, tuition, books. A night out with said friends, or treating a nice young lady to dinner, were not part of the agreement. He needed cash. 

Now Sam’s old life had given him a very specific set of skills and they were actually pretty marketable in the right market. He could clean out a crime scene so well the CIA would be jealous. He didn’t know many people who could pick a lock faster than he could, he was a better sniper than his dad, he was a better car thief than his brother. He could pick a pocket as easily as a lock, he was no pro hacker but he did okay and he could hustle darts or pool with the best of them too. The problem of course was that he had come to Stanford to build a life away from all of these things not on them. However he had also developed another skill, one that would probably only be profitable at a research institution or maybe the Vatican. He printed up some fliers and put them up around the classics and history departments. Within twelve hours he got his first message and his first translation project: a single page of pretty simple Church Latin from the twelfth century, already transcribed and typed up. Literally all he had to do was translate it into English and he’d get fifty bucks. It wouldn’t even take him an hour of work.

All in all, college life looked pretty good for Sam Winchester. He stayed busy, busy enough that he shouldn’t have had time to pause and notice the absence by his side. He couldn’t help but wonder if the open-minded women of the freshman dorm would have been so generous with their time if there had been a slightly shorter, more muscular blond standing just in front of him with a little sneer and a leather jacket. Every time he went out to play soccer he heard snide jokes about balls in a drawl that was far too young to be as soaked in whiskey as it was. 

In the first week he went to a couple of dive bars with his fake IDs just to keep in practice – you never knew when you might need to raise a little cash in a hurry – and it was a whole different ball game when you didn’t have a cocky asshole watching your back. He finally heard back from Pastor Jim a week after the break. He’d have called back sooner, he said, but his father had come to his house. They were both alive. Dean and Jim had even taken on a hunt while they were there. Dad had stayed home; apparently he’d had some busted ribs or something. “Self-defense,” Sam told him. “He got mine first.” 

His mentor sighed. “I know, Sam. I wasn’t there, but I’m not surprised. I know how John can be. He was pretty upset. He misses you.”

Sam snorted. “He misses controlling me,” he clarified. “He never got much enjoyment from having me around. They’re better off without me screwing everything up, you know? They can do their thing. Any idea where they were going?”

“John said something about the Bridgewater Triangle. He thought it would help get their heads back in the game.” He paused. “I think a call from you would really make all the difference, Sam.” 

“I’ve been calling Dean. He hasn’t been returning my calls, but I’ll keep at it. Dad doesn’t want to hear from me. He made that pretty clear.”

“He’s been pretty torn up, Sam. He’s your father and he loves you. I know he’s bad at showing it, but he does love you.” 

Sam couldn’t tell if he was choking back a laugh or tears, or possibly just a mouthful of water. Love was not complaining about your son’s lack of killer instinct at the age of two, nor was it forcing him into a career path for which he was clearly unsuited. Love did not involve holding the lives of strangers more dear than the lives of your sons or a militant opposition to any comfort or joy for said sons. “Yeah. Okay.” He didn’t want to alienate the one person from his past who might actually still care. “So you said you went on a hunt with Dean?”

“Yeah, simple salt and burn. I probably didn’t even really need backup but he needed to get out a bit, stretch his legs. You know how he gets.”

“Yeah, I do, sir. Thank you for calling me back.” 

“I’ll always call eventually, Sam. Just because your father’s being an ass doesn’t mean the rest of us are going to be. Call me if you need anything, you hear?”

“You too, Pastor Jim.” He hung up and sighed. Then he tried Dean again. Truth be told he no longer even had much hope that his brother would pick up, but he had to try. “Hey, Dean. It’s me. I hope things are going well for you. I’m settling in here well. You wouldn’t believe the food here, I think even you would get full eventually. I miss you. I like it here, but it’s weird to not have you here, you know? Anyway, I just wanted to check in. It sure would be nice to hear your voice, you know? Give me a call.” He hung up, and went to go reassure Meli that he’d heard his family had gone to Massachusetts. (The fact that they’d lost no time in getting as far from his sorry ass as possible he kept to himself.) 

Two days later he tried Dean’s number again. Instead of getting the usual snarky “Leave your name, number and nightmare at the tone” message, he got a synthesized voice telling him that “the cellular number you are trying to reach is no longer is in service. Please check your number and try again.” He couldn’t leave a message, but he’d gotten one loud and clear.

* John* 

John Winchster more or less checked out when his youngest left. He made a plan, and he remembered making a plan. He didn’t remember making the detour to Blue Earth, and he’d been sober at the time. If he didn’t know better he’d have suspected possession and when he came back to himself he made a note to talk to Dean about that. He’d never have had to do that if the stubborn son-of-a… if Sam had stuck around, of course. Sam was always alert for things like that, had been ever since he’d stolen his father’s journal and learned possession was possible and so very much more.

It had probably been that moment, that single point in time, that had led to this. Once John had ensconced Dean firmly in his (and Sam’s) old room in the rectory and wrapped himself around a large glass of something cheap at the biker bar down the road he could admit that to himself. The kid had been all of what, eight? Eight years old and reading some of the things that John had written in those early, bloodthirsty days. As opposed to the later bloodthirsty days. Merry Christmas, kid, your father has thought you were a shirker and insufficiently respectful of your mother’s holy memory since you were two – oh, and by the way, all sorts of things are hunting you and think you’re a supernatural freak. Just like the supernatural freaks that your brother and father hunt. If he’d known then that Sam had read the journal he’d have taken him aside and explained things to him properly, tried to put them in context for him. 

Well, no he wouldn’t. This deep into a conversation with Senor Cuervo he could be honest; by the time Sammy was eight he’d long since ceased to be the kind of father who did that kind of thing, but maybe he’d have farmed that job out to someone else. Pastor Jim, probably. Jim and Sammy had a really good kind of rapport, maybe it was because of all those damn books. Maybe Jim could have explained to the kid that … that something. Dean had tried, he revealed later. A full year later when the boys had come to him about the thing in Sam’s closet (which had turned out to be residual energy anyway) he’d thought he was giving this big heartbreaking reveal and the alien eyes had just looked back and said, “Yeah, I know monsters are real, you left your journal on the table last Christmas. I think it’s a spirit.”

He and Dean had talked about it later (after dropping Sam off at the library, the kid’s only actual consolation) and he’d confessed everything. But Dean had already been too much of a soldier, and John stood by everything he’d written down even if he hadn’t expressed it correctly at the time. He’d never bothered to read the journal, presumably because his father had given him an order not to touch it. Sam had realized that he was being kept in the dark about something that he needed to know about so he went to the most readily available source of information and found out things about himself John would have given anything for the boy to have not seen.

And of course John should have seen the changes at the time but he didn’t. He was too busy looking for more evil to hunt, because evil had destroyed his family and so he was blind to his family. Sammy had stopped looking at him. Sammy had stopped speaking to him if he could avoid it. He’d stopped being Sammy, too – only Sam, and John had… just accepted it. Mary had called him Sammy and so he had called him Sammy and Dean had called him Sammy but when he rejected that his father had just gone along with it, like he couldn’t even remember that Mary had called him anything. Couldn’t remember that his beautiful and perfect Mary had ever had a connection with this cold, alien being in the backseat who would only communicate with his brother, and even then only if John wasn’t in the room. And John had backed off. Dean never gave up on Sammy, never let him be Sam. He remembered that Sammy was Mary’s son just as much as he was. He tried to reconcile the boy to his fate as best he could and frankly Dean was good at it. He could get cooperation out of Sam with just a few whispered words and a smile when John couldn’t get him to budge with bellows, blows or the belt. (He remembered once when Sam had dug in his heels about some fool thing, he couldn’t remember what it was anymore, and when pain didn’t work John decided to try to starve him out. He had to learn to follow orders. There were lives at stake after all – his brother’s, for starters. Anyway, Dean had just shaken his head and laughed. “You can starve him all you want Dad,” he’d said. “The kid don’t eat.”)

He’d pretty much handed Sam off to his brother when their mother died and he wasn’t proud of that, but there was nothing to be done about it now. There was nothing he could do about much of anything. Sam would have already ditched his phone. He might not know the boy, he couldn’t even begin to pretend to understand the boy, but he’d trained him and he’d seen those alien eyes gleam when they’d talked about some subjects. Subjects like going underground. Not that he had truly gone underground. He wasn’t actually off the grid – he was at Stanford for crying out loud. He was a sitting duck in Palo Alto getting fat and complacent for whatever was after him. But he wouldn’t want to be contacted by John, which was why he would have ditched his phone early in the game. Jim hadn’t mentioned having been contacted by Sam, but of course he would have called. The guy was always Sam’s favorite after Dean, and he’d have to have an emergency contact, right? That was good. Someone should know where the kid was, what was going on with him. Jim would know. And Dean, of course. Sam might have ditched his phone and John might have checked out for anything but putting the truck into drive but he would have been stupid not to notice that Dean had gotten multiple calls from the a number that he kept sending to voice mail. Sam was making sure that his brother was able to get hold of him. 

Well, that was fine. John wouldn’t say anything about it. He’d made a declaration that night – Dean wasn’t to even mention his brother’s name and he had to stand by it if he was going to have any kind of authority – but he knew the boy couldn’t give his Sammy up completely. He didn’t even want him to. He’d raised the boy. John knew that, he might be ashamed that one son had raised the other but he could at least own it between himself and the tequila. Dean could no more cut Sammy off than he could cut off his own leg. No more could Sammy cut Dean off. They needed each other, even if only to check in and reassure one another that they were alive and relatively whole. Hell, wasn’t that Sam’s whole thing? That he couldn’t stand to watch Dean keep getting hurt? So he didn’t say anything about it, because he trusted Dean. He trusted Dean with this secret disobedience, because it wasn’t really disobedience at all.

After a few days at Jim’s (and a few nights at the various bars in Blue Earth) he was more with it, could hold it together better and they could move on. And move on they did, winding their way East. He decided they would head to the Bridgewater Triangle. He’d gone there with Sam once a few years ago, figuring it was a good way to get the kid’s head more into the game. There was always something to hunt and it was always going to be weird, so it should have caught the boy’s imagination and engaged those huge brain cells of his. Dean hadn’t been with them, so of course Sam had been sullen and contrary and of course John had lost it with him. But now it would be different, because Dean was actually good. Not great about thinking for himself – but that was a failing on John’s part, not his own. Dean was plenty smart.

As they snaked their way down past Chicago, and through Ohio, through upstate New York and then across Massachusetts John took the opportunity to observe his only remaining child. Dean was smart. He was plenty good at thinking on his feet when he had to, and there were plenty of times when he had to. In Syracuse they got in a little over their heads at a biker bar on Wolf Street and because John was frankly still reeling from Sam’s defection, both physically and mentally, Dean had to step in and pick up the slack. He’d gotten them out without shots fired and before the cops showed up and if a couple of the belligerents wound up having misplaced their wallets he’d be willing to bet that no one would ever even suspect either of the drifters who’d technically caused the fracas in the first place. But he’d always deferred to others – to John when it involved hunting or something major or to Sam when it involved getting out of trouble. He lacked confidence. What he needed was more solo work, and why not? He was trustworthy. He was loyal. He was capable and he was a good son. 

First though they would go to Bridgewater.

* Dean*

They had the cash to rent a crappy two-room in a by-the-week place in Fall River. It stank of old pot and cheap incense. They could walk to any number of bars from here, which was fabulous because Massachusetts could be pretty uptight about drunk driving. Of course they were pretty uptight about weaponry and it seemed like everyone in their new neighborhood was carrying so maybe it was less of a thing but whatever. Sam called again. “Hey Dean, it’s me. I really miss you. It’s a nice night here. Kind of reminds me of when we used to just sit out and watch the stars, you know? ‘Course, that was because we were living out of the Impala at that point I guess, but you know whatever. I hope you’re doing okay, you’re not hurt and everything. Met a girl – Lori. She reminded me of you. Give me a call if you get a chance.” 

They went on a tour of the Lizzie Borden house. It was as good a place as any to start, not that either of them expected to actually work the Lizzie Borden case. No one was actually dying at the Borden house. If there was anything haunting the house at all – and he wasn’t sure, the place was such a tourist destination that it seemed a little too perfect – no one was being hurt. Sammy would have argued against it for exactly that reason – no reason to harm the spirit if it wasn’t hurting anyone. And Dad would have forced him to do the hunt himself just to harden him to the task, because if it was supernatural it had to die. Why was that such a thing for Sammy anyway? Of course it had to die. But it didn’t matter now, because now that Sammy was gone a lot of the fight seemed to have gone out of his father. Haunted or not their actual lead for the day came not from the tour itself but from a website the tour guide recommended. People could go online and leave their own encounters with the supernatural, which were then posted for the entire world to see. They went over to the local public library to check it out and found an address that looked a lot more promising than the stupid Lizzie Borden house.

It was an old triple decker that had been used as a rental for about a hundred years, and according to this site the stories had been piling up for at least fifty of them. The pair took a quick walk by and found that it had been condemned. Well, that was convenient – no one to complain when they broke in late at night. The stories were pretty hair-raising. Dad had printed them out and brought them back to the apartment. The grammar was pretty hair-raising too. Geez, he’d skated by on homework he made his little brother do and he could write better than this. Once they sifted through the ballistic punctuation, whimsical spelling and MILITANT CAPS LOCK they’d found a good solid body of anecdotal evidence. There were full-bodied apparitions, footsteps, things disappearing, phantom voices, walls dripping with what appeared to be blood. “Geez, Dad,” Dean said. “If even half of this crap is real I’m surprised another hunter hasn’t picked up on this already.” 

The older hunter had shrugged. “The Internet as a research tool is kind of new to our kind, Dean. S – he was kind of unique that way, and it was pretty useful. We got a lot of jobs that way.”

You think the guy would have told Sammy that while he was here? Of course, that wasn’t his job. That wasn’t how chain of command worked. It had been Dean’s job, because he could goddamn well see how useful it had been. He hadn’t made Sammy see how much they relied on those geek skills of his, so he’d felt like they weren’t doing any good and he’d figured they weren’t useful and he’d just gone. It was just one more way Dean had failed, failed Sammy and failed Dad. Failed Mom. “Yes, sir.”

“Of course, it could just as easily be the same guy posting all of these stories. You know, justifying torching the place because he can’t rent it. It’s in a crappy neighborhood and it looks like it’s going to take a lot of work to bring it up to code.” Dad gave him half a smile. “That’s why we don’t just go in there half-assed. That’s how guys get killed. Tomorrow you go to the library and start looking for leads. What are you going to look for?”

It was a pop quiz. Of course it was. Twenty three years old and he was still getting quizzes. “I’m going to start with newspaper articles about the property and the surrounding properties,” he told him. “I’ll add local stories and legends if I don’t find something that makes sense quickly, but I think we should honestly not disregard that. Sir,” he added quickly. John raised an eyebrow. “The blood running down the walls is weird, sir. Assuming there’s more than one poster it’s a sign that there may be something larger at work, something bigger than a nasty spirit. Multiple people seeing full-bodied apparitions suggests that whatever’s there is at least pretty powerful; we should know what we’re dealing with.”

“Good thinking, Dean. I agree. Part of being involved with the Bridgewater Triangle is the fact that something can start out small – a garden variety haunting – and turn into something huge and bizarre and unique to this part of the world. There’s a reason H. P. Lovecraft wrote here.”

“I thought he was from Providence, sir.”

“That’s not too far away, Dean, and don’t be a smartass. He knew an awful lot about this place, and he set a lot of his stories up on the North Shore too. Maybe we’ll check things out up there next.” He shrugged. “There’s plenty of work to be done right here, you know. I’ll go to town hall and work on the property records. We’ll meet up back here after the library closes and talk about our findings, all right?”

“Sounds good, Dad.”

“For tonight, how about if we hole up and watch the Sox lose?”

He laughed. “You going native, Sir?” 

For the night they almost seemed normal. Sammy didn’t know what he was missing, with his girls and his howling whiteshoes and his food.

The next day the Winchesters split up as previously arranged. Dean hated the library but he knew his dad hated it just as much so he didn’t complain. Instead he got through the articles as quickly as he could. Thank God they’d gotten a grant to digitize the microfilm and microfiche collections; otherwise he could see growing old in here. He could plug in the search terms just like Sammy taught him and let the processors do the work. There were a couple of real estate transactions from the past thirty years to include several complaints about the property being allowed to fall into such terrible repair. A child had died when the back deck had collapsed about ten years ago – the boy would have been the same age as Sammy, which made his blood run cold – but they’d been squatting illegally and the lawsuit had been dismissed out of hand. Evidently the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had the crazy idea that while property owners could certainly be held responsible for the state of their property they weren’t responsible for bad parenting decisions on the part of other people, and they furthermore considered squatting in a building that was already labeled as condemned and fenced off to be a bad parenting decision. Dean repressed a shudder. That could have easily been them. Except it couldn’t have, because Dean had kept them safe.

Before that there were mentions of the property but mostly in the police blotter. There were an awful lot of prowler calls, significantly more than would be normal for this neighborhood and never with anyone ever being picked up. The callers always insisted that the suspect was actually in the home rather than outdoors which was weird. There were a lot of domestic disputes as well, regardless of the tenants. It had started about fifty years ago when an apparently perfectly normal factory worker had come home and very calmly slit the throats of each of his six children and then his wife, in ascending order of age. Before that there were no apparent reports in the papers of anything exciting or weird or different on the property. It was just another in an endless series of triple deckers. So what might have made the perfectly normal factory worker nut out and slit his family’s throats? By the time he finished with the newspapers the library was closing, but he was able to bring something home to show his father.

John didn’t come home empty handed. Initially the home had been in the hands of a single family – the top floor rented out to whoever, the second going to a family member (son or daughter) and the ground floor being occupied by the owner. As the owner died off the heir would move downstairs and the cycle would renew itself, but after the slaughter of 1952 that changed. Then the entire facility became rental-only, and no one ever stayed longer than one lease term. Even then people often broke the lease. The building itself changed hands frequently and had been abandoned following a fire in 1992 that left it uninhabitable. They agreed that the next day they would attack the local history section and see what they could come up with for details. What could have sparked a slaughter like that? Dean’s mind recoiled from the very concept. When he slept that night he dreamed of the six children and the wife just lining up in that top floor apartment, waiting to be killed. Who could do something like that? Family was everything. Were they simply so accustomed to blind obedience that they didn’t question the need to die by the hand of the man of the house? Or was there something else at work? It had to be something else.

When he woke up the next morning there was another message from Sam. “Hey, Dean. It’s Sam. So get this, I’m making money doing Latin translations. Who knew someone would actually pay for that crap, right? I really wish you were here, man. April found this shop that sells nothing but pie. I can’t even walk in there, but she brought back a piece of pecan and all I could think of was you. Give me a call, Dean. I miss you.” His hands shook. Sammy missed him, but he’d made his choice. And he was doing okay. He had a girl, or maybe even two. He had school. He had pie. He was even making money. (What did he even need money for? He had a full ride, right?) He didn’t need his big brother anymore. John needed his sons. He needed his soldiers. He needed a soldier he could trust, someone who could follow orders without question.

He left a note for his dad and found the nearest mobile phone store. When he got back he gave his father the new number. “How come you changed it?” Dad asked. He shrugged. “It’s good to change them every once in a while,” he replied. “Makes you harder to trace.” He called his important contacts with the new number. Sammy wasn’t among them, but he made sure that Sammy’s new phone number was safely transferred over.


	4. The Mountains and the Canyons Started to Tremble and Shake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> College life isn't as normal as it seems. Dean and John are frustrated in their attempts to research the Fall River case, leading them to accept some outside help.

Sam 

Sam dreamed.

He’d always dreamed. Well, of course he dreamed. Everyone dreamed. They dreamed or they died, organs shutting down and mind ablaze. They might or might not remember the dreams of course, and they weren’t necessarily significant. Dreams were nothing more than the brain’s way of processing information that it had received during the waking day, often information that it didn’t even know it had received. Dreams processed things a person noticed out of the corner of his eye or snippets of half-overheard conversations. His father had told him that his own overactive imagination supplied the rest, and his own research backed him up on that. Dreams were his mind’s way of trying to make sense out of a world that really made no sense at all. He dreamed of his father and his brother alone in some crap apartment, brother sleeping on a couch as sunlight streamed through broken blinds. He dreamed of the church in Blue Earth, of the crucifix looming over the aisle and a woman with short blonde hair. He dreamed of his own youth and the things he’d seen. He dreamed of angels, angels who were afraid to touch him because of his own corruption. Two weeks into his first semester, though, he began to dream of something familiar. He dreamed he was in the sweaty, steamy, sulfurous place again.

He wasn’t sure why he saw this place in his dreams every so often. Sometimes the dreams followed specific events and those tended to be kind of traumatic but sometimes they didn’t and those were at least interesting dreams. They made sleep less odious anyway. This time he dreamed himself there as always, but he found himself alone. This stood in sharp contrast to his typical dreams so he wandered for a little while, exploring the damp hallways. He didn’t want to touch much of anything – the doors were kind of slimy and the people in the cells didn’t seem to be able to see him at all. He thought he caught a draft coming from a corridor to his right so he followed it. When he pushed open that door (and wiped the accompanying dampness on his jeans) he found himself in a new corridor. It looked a lot like a hallway in one of the academic buildings, but not one where he had any actual classes. The images seemed distorted somehow, almost like he was looking through a fish-eye lens or even a peephole. He almost got vertigo from the angle but he kept his lunch inside as he walked along. Only when he passed a doorway did he figure out where he actually was. “Microbiology,” the door declared. “Dr. J. A. Welch, Dept. Chair.” A pale hand, far too small and pale to be his own, reached out to smear a substance onto the doorknob. 

He woke with a start. What the actual Hell? The clock told him that it was three-thirty in the morning. He’d managed two and a half hours of sleep. He leaned back onto his pillow. It hadn’t been an actual nightmare, not really. Nothing had actually happened. But it had certainly been… weird. Well, weird was his life these days, even if he was doing everything in his power to make his life more normal. The pounding in his ears clued him in to the fact that a return to slumber was pretty unlikely. He rose and dressed for a run. He might as well make productive use of the time, after all. 

When he got out to the common room, though, he found that he was not the only one to be visited by insomnia. “Meli!” he identified as she fumbled with the coffee maker, glad he hadn’t pulled his gun. “Isn’t it a little early for you?” 

One side of her mouth quirked up. “I’d say the same for you, but you’re developing a reputation.” He blushed a little and looked away. “Hey – no judgment here, buddy. As long as everyone’s having a good time and safe and everything it’s so none of my business. But you seem to be alone, so… you want to talk about it? Are you just homesick, or…” 

He scoffed. “Weird dreams.” 

“I don’t even want to know what someone raised as a hunter dreams about,” she said, stretching. “I’m guessing you’ve seen some stuff…”

He shrugged. “I’m sure there’s people who’ve seen worse, you know? I mean, yeah, I’ve seen some crap, but whatever. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly a nightmare, just weird. But I know I won’t be getting back to sleep so I figured I’d be productive.”

She sighed. “Yeah. I guess.”

“What about you?” 

“No weird dreams. No dreams at all. I just couldn’t sleep.” She glanced at him. “Sam, I know you’re done with hunting…”

He didn’t wince. “But…”

She gave him a wry grin. “But did you learn a lot from your dad?” 

“More than I’d like, but yeah. Why?” 

She grabbed a notebook from a pile of her things on a counter and opened it. “I saw this symbol painted onto a doorway in the biology department today. It could be nothing but it’s making me really uneasy.”

He bit his lip. “I’ve seen it before. I’m pretty sure this part here –“ he pointed at a complicated piece – “is an old medieval alchemical symbol for something like… sulfur, maybe? I’d need to look it up but it wouldn’t take me more than ten minutes.” He frowned. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. “Just out of curiosity, Meli, did you see it anywhere near the Microbiology department?”

She blinked, turning to face him. “Why would you even know that, Sam?”

“My, uh, dream. I saw the Microbiology department.” He looked away. 

“Have you ever been to the bio building?” 

“No.”

“Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No! It was just a weird dream, okay? Everyone has them. I probably heard a description or saw a picture or something. I’ve done enough stitches, I probably considered a pre-med major myself.” He forced his hackles down. “You want to go check out that symbol?”

“Might as well. Like you said, if we’re going to be awake we might as well be productive.” She gave him a tired little smile. If her eyes were a little guarded she didn’t make an issue of it. 

They went back to his room. He knew exactly which book to look for, or rather which books. He had one on alchemy and one on demonology, and it didn’t take long for him to find what he was looking for. “Okay,” he said. “Someone’s combined these two symbols – this one for sulfur like I thought, and this one for the demon Uphir. Medieval demonologists thought he was Hell’s physician.”

The future doctor blinked. “Why the hell would they want to do a foolish thing like that?”

“Honestly? It could be something as simple as someone starting up a band and thinking it made a great logo,” he admitted. “I mean, we’ve actually seen that before, except they wound up summoning something unsavory and dying horribly.” 

“Seriously?”

“No one was too broken up about it. They really sucked. But yeah, that could be what happened here. Are there a lot of garage bands among pre-med and bio majors?”

She shook her head. “Okay, then my next guess would be someone using black magic.” 

She laughed. “Oh, come on, hunter-boy.” 

“Don’t call me that.”

“O-kay… Sam. Sorry. Look, this is Stanford. They’re not just science majors, they’re here For Science, with capital letters and everything. This is serious business here. It’s who we are and what we do. We don’t even believe in black magic much less practice it.” Her tongue ran around her lips quickly. Her fingers twitched by her sides. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t figure out where the protection symbols in our rooms came from, Meli?” he asked her gently. “You recognized my dad’s name, you’re the only one I can see even kind of knowing about the supernatural world. And then there’s the fact that you’re the only one on the floor from New Orleans.” She looked sheepish. “It’s okay, Meli. I’m the last one who’s going to tell anyone, all right?”

“You’re a hunter, Sam!”

“No. I’m not. I’m a goddamn student trying to get through his freshman year in one piece. Yeah, I was raised by hunters, Meli, but I’m not one of them. Hell, the first girl I ever kissed turned out to be a kitsune. The kitsune my father and brother were hunting, all right?”

Her eyes widened. “You’re joking.”

“No.” 

“What happened to her?”

“She’s still out there somewhere. The point is that I’m not going to out you for doing whatever it is you do just because my father’s a narrow-minded bigot. I’m more uncomfortable with the black magic but…”

“But?” 

“I mean, if they aren’t hurting anyone but themselves, right? I mean, has anyone actually been harmed by it? Are people getting sick?”

“No, not that I know of. No one’s gotten sick, no one’s died.”

He sighed. “So, they’re endangering their own soul, but not anyone else.” 

“So far.”

“Yeah. There’s that. I mean, I don’t want to interfere with their choice, you know? And I’m not a hunter. I’m out of that. But… if they do step things up and start actually hurting people I mean I can’t just let that slide… can I?”

“I’d certainly prefer that you didn’t, since it’s in the building that I’m in most days,” she retorted. “What do you want to do?” 

“I don’t know. Figure out what’s going on, I guess.” He glanced at her. “Feel like taking a field trip?” 

“Right now? It’s four in the morning!”

“No time like the present. There won’t be anyone to see us poking around.” 

“Grad students looking to get in good with their advisors will start getting in around seven.”

“We’ve got time then.”

“Everything will be locked up!”

“Not a problem.” He gave her a half-smile. “If you’re uncomfortable you don’t have to come with me.”

She sighed. “No, no. I’ll come. Let me just put something on that isn’t pink fluffy bunny slippers.” 

He looked down. Her feet were indeed clad in pink fluffy bunny slippers. “Yeah, those aren’t great when it comes to running or climbing.”

“Do you think we’ll be doing a lot of either?” 

“To be honest? There’s always running. And climbing. There’s usually quite a bit of jumping and falling too. Although we’re just breaking into the science center and it’s just us so maybe, just maybe, we can get away with just running.”

As it turned out they managed to get away with walking. They walked over to the biology building, where Sam managed to pick the lock in record time. The precision with which the building matched his dream gave him a shiver but he didn’t share it with his companion. He didn’t need to freak her out too. She led him to the Microbiology department and went to open the door but he stopped her. “That was in my dream,” he told her tersely. “Don’t touch anything with your bare hands in here.” He took off one of his layers and used the shirt as a barrier between his hand and the door.

“That’s going to be challenging seeing as how I’m in here once a week,” she hissed back, following him into the room. “I can’t start acting like a lunatic based on one of my residents’ dreams, you know?”

“So what exactly is it that your family is so into that got them onto my dad’s radar?” he whispered back. Why they were whispering he didn’t know. The suite was deserted. “And where did – oh.” He could see the symbol Meli had mentioned, right up in the doorway above one of the professors’ offices. It seemed innocuous, but that made it all the more suspicious. Someone doing graffiti for a band or something would have made it much more obvious, not carved it into the corner of a doorframe. “Who is Dr. Eccleston?”

She shrugged. “He’s an award-winning microbiologist. He does a lot of work with the pre-med students. He’s not my advisor but he’s helping me with some of my work for distinction. Why?”

“Whatever’s going on involves him.” 

“It’s not him,” she insisted, turning to face him.

“How do you know?” 

“Because you said this is black magic. Not only is this guy Mr. Hard Science, this is spellwork and spellwork is inherently unsanitary. He would never be able to get the results he does if he were getting involved with magic of any kind, okay? His work all needs to be done in an extremely sterile environment and even if he were just doing the kind of spellwork that involves really dry components then he’d still have to be doing decontamination showers every time he even thought about going near a lab.” 

Gotcha, Sam thought and he grinned. “Hoodoo,” he identified, almost leaning against a door and stopping himself at the last minute. 

She blinked. “what?”

“That’s what your family does. Why they had a run-in with my dad. Hoodoo.” 

“You figured it out from me talking about spellwork?”

“Well, that and I saw the protection symbols around the dorm. I knew someone was doing it.” 

She stuck her chin out defiantly. “You got a problem with it?”

“Why would I have a problem with it?”

“Your dad sure did when he killed my uncle.”

His shoulders slumped. “I’m… I’m sorry about that. I don’t know why he did that, the story behind it. I really don’t. Dad doesn’t see a lot of shades of gray, you know? For him anything that is beyond ‘normal’ – God I hate that word – and average and I guess typical is synonymous with evil and has to be destroyed.”

“But you don’t see things that way.” 

“If I could I wouldn’t be here.” He looked around. “Okay, so do we want to see what’s in the good doctor’s office? Maybe there’s a clue. He might not be the one causing it but he could be the target.” He spent about thirty seconds with the professor’s lock and they were in. “When’s the last time you paid him a visit?”

“About three days ago, I think. Why?” She frowned. “Okay, that’s different, and I don’t think it’s good.” She moved to grab at a bundle of dried flowers on the bookshelf. “That’s bindweed, and amaranth.”

“Bindweed is for control,” Sam remembered, “hence the catchy name. What about the amaranth?”

“Spirits and necromancy,” she replied quickly. “Nothing I actually get involved with, nor my family either.” 

“Not accusing you of anything,” he said. “But… why would he have this here? I mean, he wouldn’t be doing his spell work here in the office, there’s too much of a chance someone would see him or he’d contaminate his work, right?”

She smiled. “Right. So whoever is doing it would have given it to him, maybe as a gift? Or maybe they would have just left it here to enhance whatever it was that they were doing? The question is what do we actually do about it.” 

He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. This would be the point where his father or Dean made the decision. He’d never been allowed to have input into the plan, to be involved with the actual strategy before. Usually he got sent out for coffee so as to have as little impact on that part of the process as possible. Of course now that he needed the experience with that kind of planning he didn’t have it – but that had been the plan all along, hadn’t it? Keep him dependent, ignorant, unable to process or function without them? “Well no good can possibly come of necromancy,” he theorized. Well, actually there might be but there had to be better ways. What was dead should stay dead. “Whatever’s going on here I kind of feel like we don’t have to make it easy for them, you know? Besides, it’s keeping you from sleeping and it’s seeping into my dreams, so it’s only benefitting us to tone it down a bit. Right?”

She chuckled. “So it’s entirely self-interest to stop it.”

“Right.” 

She shook her head. “Let’s do it. Got a Sharpie?”

“Always.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out the marker she’d asked for. “What are you doing?” 

She crouched down and started sketching in a corner. “No one’s likely to look over here. Protection symbols. I don’t really have a lot of time to research and do this right but I figure it can’t hurt, you know?” 

He shrugged. “Will you show me later?”

“Seriously?”

“I’m all about safe, I told you.” He reached into his bag and grabbed a bundle of sage. “In the meantime…” He lit it and muttered a brief incantation as the scent began to fill the room, lightening the atmosphere considerably. He wrapped the offending bundle of herbs in his shirt and they made their escape, burning the bundle behind the building before they headed back to the dorm. 

“That was actually pretty awesome,” Meli told him as they got out of the elevator. “I feel a lot less anxious now.” 

He smiled. “I’m glad. Think you’ll be able to sleep?” 

“I should be good for a couple of hours. I don’t have class until noon today so yeah, I should be good.” 

“Great. Let me know if you notice anything else weird. The caster might not be scared off just because we torched some herbs, you know?” 

Her smile fell just a little. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

*

John 

That at least got a little bit of a laugh out of him. “Sorry, sir. I guess I’m just not cut out for all this… this.” He gestured at the pile of books in front of him. “I’m not used to all this crap, you know? It’s not how my mind works.” 

“Well, you need to get your mind used to working that way son. The research isn’t going to do itself.” He didn’t let himself react to the sigh, the way his son’s shoulders deflated. They were Winchesters, damn it. They didn’t hug. “Have you found anything yet? Anything relevant?”

“A church burned down a mile away back in 1972.”

He almost perked up. “Anything demonic?” 

“Two kids necking overturned a votive display.” 

“So no.” He sighed. “Why don’t you go scout out the site, Dean? I’ll see what I can’t dig up here.” Truth be told he was no more cut out for this than Dean was, but he was at least more accustomed to it. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered his father again, his real father and not the man his mother had married after a couple of years. Henry Winchester had been bookish too. He half-remembered shelves filled with books. Then he remembered when his father didn’t come back, and his mother resolutely packing up the books. Was Henry still out there somewhere? Did John have half-siblings in Atlanta that he’d just never known about? Apparently the “book” gene had bred true. It was probably on the same allele as the “walk away from your family and never look back” gene. He wouldn’t think about that. He had to focus on the case. People were dying. If that didn’t matter to Sam, screw him. Let the demons or whoever take him. He’d failed as a parent but that wasn’t exactly news. 

For three days he and Dean traded back and forth on the research, getting equally frustrated. There was absolutely nothing that they could find to indicate why a perfectly normal machinist would suddenly and methodically slaughter his entire family, or why said family would allow themselves to be butchered so very meekly. There had never been the slightest sign of trouble with the family, not even a visit to the principal’s office. Finally John broke down and called Pastor Jim. “Howdy, Jim,” he said when his old friend answered. 

“John, it’s good to hear your voice!” the priest greeted. “How’s Massachusetts this time of year?”

“The despair is overwhelming,” he chuckled. “I think there’s been a campaign to trade the Red Sox to Connecticut for a couple of years now.” 

“Hah! Never happen. They’re too attached to their misery. Only Cubs fans are worse. Have you and Dean found something to hunt yet?” 

“Well,” he admitted, scratching at his beard, “that’s kind of what we’re calling you about. We’re working a case here in Fall River and we’re kind of hitting a dead end. It could be a simple haunting but I’m not so sure. The place has had a lot of problems since the upstairs tenant slaughtered his whole family fifty years ago.” He sketched out the details. “Can you think of anything that might have made that happen, Jim? I’m really kind of at a loss here, and I think Dean might torch the library if I send him in there again.” 

“Really feeling the loss, aren’t you, John?”

For a moment the hunter felt the rage rise in him but it was only a moment. Jim wasn’t being cruel, he wasn’t teasing, he wasn’t mocking. He was helping. It was probably what he did with any grieving parent.

“This is weird, Jim,” he muttered. “The kid was always good at weird. He’d have figured it out three days ago and had time to find a coffee shop too.”

“It’s true,” the cleric chuckled. “I can’t say that I can think of anything off the top of my head, but I swear my brain is getting to be like a sieve these days. Let me see what I can dig up, make a few calls. I’ll see what I can find.”

For a few days he and Dean treaded water. They talked to witnesses but didn’t get more information than the original website. They looked into some other cases in the area so they wouldn’t have to kill quite so much time when the case was over. They took a couple of trips down to the Connecticut casinos to build up their coffers, and John was absolutely floored by Dean’s ability to win at poker. Then Jim called back. “All right,” the priest told him. He sounded tired. “I found a guy who has a few ideas but he needs more details.” 

“Great. When can he get here?”

“Oh no, Johnny.” He bristled at the nickname but let his friend speak. “The guy is on the other side of the country and he’s not in a position to travel right now.” 

“What kind of hunter doesn’t travel, Jim? Come on.”

“The kind of hunter that lives in a community, John.” He sighed. “Besides, this guy isn’t actually a hunter. He knows the life but he’s not part of it. He’s more of a scholar. He didn’t say, but I’m pretty sure he’s working his own thing right now anyway. He sounded a little tense. He’s willing to do some research for you but he needs more information. He needs the police reports from the original crime scene, with the photos, and he told me they’re not digitized. That means you’re going to have to get them for him, all right?”

“Seriously? He wants us to break into a police station and get evidence?” He laughed. “This guy doesn’t ask for much.”

“This is why you’re running short on friends, Johnny. He’s asking you to get a crime scene report from fifty years ago. It shouldn’t be too hard. Pose as arson insurance adjusters and get copies or something. Email the copies to me, and I’ll send them to my friend. He’s a paranoid little guy and would rather not do the direct contact thing.” 

Well, this wasn’t a world you got into if you weren’t squirrely somehow. God knew John wasn’t all there. “All right. I’ll see what we can do.”

“Let me know if you have any trouble.” 

*

Dean

Dad got the police report. It wasn’t even hard. Apparently for a fifty year old cold case no one cared, no one at all. Dad was able to spin some sad tale about the owner not being able to rent it because he kept saying it was haunted or “some such malarkey,” but they thought he was just trying to get the insurance to tear it down and the lawyers were trying to make them prove that there had been problems at the site for years and blah blah blah. Dean had needed to bite the inside of his cheek to keep a straight face, because his dad had used the word “malarkey” and gotten away with it. And so the Fall River police clerk’s office, which had some intern who was bored or something, had been willing and even eager to scan the documents and everything for them and email the documents to the dummy email account Dean had set up that very morning. No joke, they hadn’t even wanted a card or anything. It was that easy. He almost felt bad about it. 

They went back to the apartment to see the fruits of their labors before sending them off to their mysterious contact. Then they waited some more. Dean met a tour guide who gave “ghost tours” of Fall River. Her name was Brandi and she didn’t actually believe in the supernatural, but she believed that other people were willing to pay to be convinced. She believed in history and the things ghost stories told about towns and people, and she thought it was hilarious that it was the parents who were brutally murdered but Lizzie whose ghost everyone thought they saw. She sounded like Sammy sometimes. Fortunately she also believed, very firmly, in body shots. 

After another damn week of treading water, in which they found three other local jobs to put in the queue once they were done with this stupid house, they heard back from Pastor Jim. “Okay, my friend has gotten a chance to look at your crime scene and he thinks he knows what happened. We spoke and he thinks that it looks like someone was summoning a demon.”

“Demons aren’t real, Jim,” Dad scoffed. He’d put his phone on speaker so they could both hear.

“That’s up for debate, John. I’m not here to argue with you about Heaven and Hell, we’ll be here all night and I know your contract isn’t up for that. We all do accept that evil spirits do exist, correct?” Dean nodded, forgetting that Jim couldn’t see them through the phone or maybe he could. “All right. There are specific signs – my contact marked them so you could see them and emailed the photos back, and I sent them on to you – that point at a specific dark spirit. My guy thinks it’s a force called Belphegor.” 

“He thinks a demon got let loose in a triple-decker and all we got was a little bit of blood on the walls?” Dean challenged. “Come on, Pastor Jim. That’s kind of…” 

“No, Dean, that’s his point. Did you even read his report?”

“He wrote a report?” Dad asked in wry amusement.

“Yes. I told you, he’s not a hunter, he’s a scholar. He’s a scholar who’s trying to convey information to a pair of strangers who are on the other side of the country without actually speaking to them. Yes he wrote a report. Honestly, John. Anyway, he doesn’t think the summoning was successful. It’s anyone’s guess as to why but he thinks that’s why this particular haunting is so severe and so unusual. The evil involved left a scar on the landscape, on the building itself. You’re going to need to be very careful if you’re going to go in there.”

“But what if the demon is in there, trapped?” Dean wanted to know. “How do we kill it?” 

“Nothing can kill a demon,” the older man replied. “Nothing we’ve got. But this guy doesn’t think the demon is actually there. It’s just residual. All you should have to worry about are the actual ghosts, but be vigilant. They’ll be more powerful than your typical spirit and probably a bit darker too.” 

“Well ain’t that just grand,” Dean said after Dad hung up the phone. “Darker and stronger.”

“I don’t like the idea that Jim is going through a contact we don’t know for help,” the older man sighed. “But I have to admit that he seems to have come up with some good theories.”

He opened up the computer and found the email. “So according to ‘Taurus67’ the summoning didn’t work because the guy doing the summoning didn’t actually know what he was doing.” He started to laugh. “His report actually calls the guy an incompetent ass-clown.”

“Seriously?” That had been one of Sammy’s most scathing insults. “I… that’s funny. He could have unleashed a demon, maybe started the Apocalypse or something, and it didn’t work because the guy was bad at art.”

“Something like that.” He shook his head. “Let’s get prepped; we’ve been cooling our heels too long on this one. We’re going in tonight.” 

Dean nodded. He’d been feeling the inaction like itching powder on his skin. He took an inventory of their weaponry started to load up.

Getting into the site should have been harder, and for any other family it probably would have been. The Winchesters were not a normal family and made short work of the fencing around the dangerously unstable house, prying open the boards over the rear entrance without leaving it obvious that they had done so. Sammy would have hated this place, Dean thought as he looked around with his flashlight. It reeked of mold and dampness and decay, and the cone of light projecting from his hand didn’t seem to extend as far as it ought. The pair stood still for a moment, letting their eyes and ears adjust. People in the outside world still went about their usual business of course. He could still hear cars going by, and sirens in the distance, and sporadic explosions that might have been fireworks in the distance. The sounds came through the walls not so much muted as warped, bent, and he had to get used to that. The damage from the fire was palpable too – what had caused that, he wondered? And how structural was the damage? It wouldn’t be the first time that he’d crash through a floor or two but it wasn’t his favorite activity. 

His father signaled that it was time to move, and they did. Activity had been documented all over the building but the actual murders had happened on the top floor. That was probably the best place to start. The pair inched their way across the debris-strewn room to the front door, trying to ignore the soft spots and the occasional skitter as they went. Had it been an actual ritual? He’d feel a lot more solid about this if it had been Sammy doing the research. The front door to the apartment wasn’t even locked – whoever had squatted in here last had just kicked it in. It was probably a metaphor for the whole damn building really. Dad went up the stairs first and Dean could hear bits of plaster crumbling with each footfall. How much longer would it be before this dump just fell in on itself? 

They got to the second floor when they realized that the staircase wasn’t going to be useable. It had collapsed in on itself past about the fifth stair at some point. The back stairs of course had been too badly damaged by the fire. He looked at his dad, who looked at him. How were they going to get upstairs to find the source of the infestation? Floorboards creaked behind them. Dean turned around slowly. A small figure about waist-high reached out for him. It was hard to make out any details in the tiny, borderline-useless light of the flashlight but what he could see were long, claw-like fingers and … nails? Yeah, those were decking nails and they were sticking out of the thing’s arms. He’d brought a crowbar, stuck it through his belt like a short sword. He pulled it out and swung it as hard as he could. “Dad!” he barked. Dad was gawking at the wall, which was bleeding. Dean raced over to him as the specter dissipated. “We got company, Dad,” he informed. “I think it’s the kid the deck fell on.”

Dad just pointed at the walls. “I thought it was an illusion, or mass hysteria,” he whispered. “Check this out.”

“I think we have to figure out a way to get upstairs,” he told the older man. “We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”


	5. To Find A Queen Without A King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam's case gets more serious. Meli is a helpful partner, even if Sam doesn't know how to accept actual help. John and Dean delve deeper into their case, although they require more help from their distant and uncooperative contact to do so.

Sam

He should have known that it wouldn’t be that simple. People didn’t start practicing black magic to give up when one of their spells was thwarted randomly in the night after all. At least he got three days of his normal life to enjoy before the weirdness came to call. It came a-calling on Friday night at about two in the morning. He’d just dozed off with Ginny, who had been feeling lonely or missing the chill of an Oregon fall or something. Whatever, Sam didn’t mind being her go-to guy and he actually got to sleep pretty quickly for once so of course that would be the night that someone came knocking on the door. “Just a second,” he called, tugging pajama bottoms on. He’d never seen someone get their clothes on as fast as Ginny did in that moment. Dean could learn something. Well, could have learned something. If he’d been around. Which he wasn’t, and wouldn’t be again.

Whoever it was seemed pretty excited about something, because they knocked again as soon as they heard his voice. “Sam, open up,” Meli called. “It’s important.”

“The RA?” Ginny asked. “What the hell could she want at this hour of the night?”

“It can’t be good,” he said, helping his companion find her shoes. “Listen, that was fun, maybe we can grab lunch or something…”

“Mmm…” she smiled, kissing him groggily as she checked for her room key. “I’ve got study group tomorrow but I’m sure we can work something out.” She opened the door. Meli stood outside, raising an eyebrow in a cross between amusement and aggravation. “See you, Sam.”

“Yeah, see you, Ginny.” He turned to the senior, who shook her head. “Meli, it’s two in the morning.”

“I see you were fast asleep,” she teased, walking in and sitting pointedly on his desk chair. 

“I was, actually. Not for long, but I was. You should be too. You had an exam today that you’ve been studying for all week, you should be out like a bad light bulb. What brings you by at this hour?” He rubbed his face.

“Rob Chin died about an hour ago,” she told him. “We were out celebrating the whole exam thing being over. He stood up, his eyes bulged out and he started vomiting blood. I think there might have been a pin or two in there, I could be wrong. Anyway, that’s what happened.”

“I take it that Rob Chin is a student of Professor Eccleston?” He grabbed a tee shirt from a drawer, because he could do that. They didn’t all live in a bag anymore.

“Top of the class in microbiology actually,” she clarified. “There’s no way he wasn’t getting into Johns Hopkins for med school.” 

He sighed and looked at his clock. He looked back at the shaken woman beside him. “Were you close?”

She shrugged. “Kind of, I guess. Rivals, but friendly rivals. I’m just… I mean, there’s no scientific explanation for what just happened.” 

“No. It’s the black magic stuff and it really narrows down the suspect pool. And if people are actually being hurt, it means we can’t just turn a blind eye to it.” He rubbed his face to try to get the blood flowing to it. “Okay. I’m, uh, going to have a shower and get cleaned up. Why don’t you make us some coffee or something?”

“Us?” she grinned. 

“Unless you want me flailing around blindly, yeah. Us. The black magic stuff I know where to start looking at least. When it comes to the biology and pre-med programs I’m going to need some guidance.”

She glanced at him. “Are you… are you going to call someone about this?”

“Not if I can avoid it. The last thing I want to do is to have family nosing around here, you know?” He shuddered and grabbed his shower kit.

When he returned the bed had been re-made – with clean sheets, he noticed wryly – and two cups of coffee awaited them on the desk. Meli had fetched her own laptop and some cookies as well. “All right,” she said. “What do we do?”

“You should know that I’ve never… I mean, my dad never actually let me lead a hunt. I wasn’t considered reliable enough.” He sighed.

“Really? Why not?” “Because I wasn’t into the whole ‘kill them all’ mentality,” he snapped. “It’s why I’m here and not there, remember? Anyway, he’d be putting all of his energy into tracking down the witch. He’d be going door to door, looking for signs and portents, breaking into dorm rooms and looking for black altars and whatnot.”

“He does that kind of thing?” 

“What are property rights when you’ve got self-righteousness on your side? Anyway, I’m not sure that’s the best way to go about it here. What’s your rank in the program?”

“Fifth, I think. Well, fourth now.”

“So no. I want to deal with this as quickly as we can. It’s obviously someone who stands to gain something by moving up in the rankings, something significant. At what point does moving up a couple of points in the class ranking stop being helpful?” He sipped at his coffee. 

“Um, I don’t know. Maybe fifteenth? It kind of depends on who you are and where you’re aiming I guess. To get into the top tier med schools you should really be in the top five percent, and ideally pretty awesome all around.” 

He glanced at her as his fingers started dancing across the keyboard. “So you’ll be going to…” 

“I’ve got a pretty decent shot at Johns Hopkins, which would be incredible. Duke is looking like a real possibility. Harvard could happen too, but being up in Boston just sounds scary.”

“Boston isn’t that bad. It’s just to the south you have to watch out for, from a creepy-scary perspective.” He had to keep her talking, keep her mind away from what he was doing on the screen. 

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. They call it the Bridgewater Triangle. You don’t hear a lot about it because everyone there just kind of accepts it, you know? They go about their merry way. ‘Oh, never you mind about that place, it’s just the Devil’s Swamp. Why do we call it that? Oh, because the Devil lives there. Why did you think, stupid redneck?’” He chuckled. “But Boston isn’t bad. Full of smart people. Duke and Johns Hopkins, though?”

“Well, Johns Hopkins is my first choice. They’re kind of the best.” 

“Sorry, I never gave it much thought. We never went in for much in the way of medical care. I don’t think I was even vaccinated until I was like nine.” Finally, he got what he was looking for. He gestured. “Okay, here we go. The top five percent of the undergraduates in the pre-medical microbiology concentration, ready for your viewing pleasure.” The list had not been updated to reflect the current vitality status of the valedictorian but considering that it was quarter of three on a Saturday morning this was unsurprising.

“Uh, Sam? How did you…”

“Well, we could go break into random people’s dorm rooms, poke around and look for signs of black magic.” She had to acknowledge his point. “It could be any of these people.” She leaned in and he forced himself to remember that this was his RA and a potential target for their evil magician. “It could be any of these people, but we can narrow it down. Whoever it is was looking to advance in the rankings and they did that. But if they were really low on the list they could have killed just about anyone and still moved up, right?”

“So we’re looking at someone high up on the list,” Sam surmised, trying not to grin. “Because they went right after the top dog. They started out by trying to influence the professor and then went after Rob when that didn’t work. Let’s start by looking at the top fifteen.”

“That includes me,” she sighed. 

And technically it did. The fact that she seemed to be working with him to find the killer didn’t mean that she was everything she seemed, and she had certainly benefitted from the demise of the top scholar. And she hadn’t really been at all pleased when she thought a hunter had turned up at school. “Maybe. But it includes all of these other people too and we’re going to consider each of them, okay?” She nodded. “Okay. First things first. Is there a possibility that any other professors were affected by a spell?”

“No. I stopped in at every other professor teaching classes in the department this semester and none of them had any kind of indication that any spells were being cast. That doesn’t mean that none are,” she admitted, “but there were no more of those weird symbols or herb bundles.”

“Well, that’s something anyway. That’s good, that’s good. It tells us that the killer had a particular problem with this teacher. Like not a personal problem, but I think they just found his class difficult.” He looked at her. “Does that sound like anyone you know on this list?”

She sighed and slumped again. “Six. Six of them, actually.” She grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down the names. “Jesus, Sam. These are people I’ve known for four years. I dated Steve.” 

“Did he seem like the kind of guy to use black magic to bring his grades up instead of studying harder?”

“Well, I didn’t think he seemed like the type to know the first thing about magic but he sure didn’t like the idea of inadequacy.” He raised an eyebrow. “We broke up.”

“Okay. Can you tell me anything else about any of them?” Of course she could. They were all brilliant – they wouldn’t be here otherwise. They were all driven, and intense. They were all a little weird. Great, Sam thought. Maybe they were a coven. That was all he needed.

Ultimately he managed to convince her that they had enough to start on and that they couldn’t really do much until morning. There was no way in Hell he was going to be able to get back to sleep but he could at least make productive use of the time. He got some homework done until it seemed like a reasonable hour to start working out. It was a good thing that his body apparently functioned without a lot of sleep. He’d gone to great lengths to pack his schedule as tight as it could go specifically so that it would allow for absolutely no thoughts of the brother who had turned him away. Over the course of his Saturday he got some more schoolwork done, got in a workout, dealt with the laundry situation, did some translating, turned in some more translating, played in a soccer game, was lauded for scoring the winning goal in said game, went for a swim, completely re-arranged Brady’s room on a 90 degree pivot and looked up the complete schedules for each of the six students Meli identified as having difficulty in Eccleston’s classes. He forgot to eat which made him cranky, but Tricia showed up and recognized that his blood sugar was more than a little low and firmly insisted on a late-night snack at the student union. Apparently her roommate had an overnight guest because she decided to stay the night, and he wasn’t about to object. She even got breakfast with him the next morning. After his morning workout he gave Meli a quick call to see about a time to go over the witch case. Then he sat down and tried to figure out what went into a spell that could make someone vomit up pins and blood. He hadn’t brought many books but he had a few, and he was sure to find something if he dug long enough. 

At about one his phone rang. He’d been hoping for Meli but much to his surprise it was Pastor Jim interrupting him. “Hi there, Sam,” he greeted. “How’ve you been?” 

“Good, sir. Good. College is treating me well.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Are you eating right? You know I’ve always worried about you like that. You never did have a great appetite.” 

He glanced at the clock. Crap, he’d forgotten about lunch. “Yeah, I’m eating fine. You wouldn’t believe the cafeteria. I think that’s what Heaven must be like. You should see the salad bar.” 

The priest laughed out loud. “You think about eating something besides rabbit food, kid? And you sound tired. Are you sure you’re doing okay?” “Yeah, yeah. I’m doing fine. I’m just a little bogged down is all. Something came up this week that I wasn’t expecting and it’s kind of intense, you know? But we’ll figure it out. I’m sure it’s not going to turn out to be a big deal.” His eye caught on a ritual alleged to make one’s enemy’s eyes boil in their sockets. “What’s going on with you?” 

“Oh, you know how it is. Souls always need saving, and the Bingo group still meets every other Wednesday.”

“Have you heard from Dean? Is he okay?” He couldn’t help but blurt the question out.

“Have you not?” “He, uh, he changed his number.” 

There was silence for a moment. “Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, I, uh, you know? I knew this was a possibility when I made my choice. I just have to suck it up and deal. I miss him, of course. I do. But it is what it is and it can’t be changed.” He took a swig of water because he was not going to cry.

“Anything can be changed, son.”

“Actually it can’t. And I’m not sure that I’d want it to. I miss Dean. I didn’t want to lose him like this, I wanted to stay in touch with him and everything but I couldn’t live like that, you know? With Dad. This is nice. How long have I been here, a month? No one has tried to kill me yet. Not a single person. I haven’t been stabbed or shot at, no evil spirits have thrown me down the stairs. And if they do guess what? I can go to a freaking hospital, because the university has one. I can get antibiotics.” He sighed. “I know I’m a huge disappointment to them, but they’re better off without me, you know? I was always holding them back, slowing them down.”

“You never held them back, son. I mean yes, they weren’t able to be as mobile while you were in school but you were a phenomenal hunter. You were an amazing shot, especially from a distance, and even Dean couldn’t match you with a blade. I mean really, Sam. You with stabby things, seriously.” 

He chuckled. “Aw, c’mon. It hardly ever got that far. Honestly, though, are they okay?”

“Physically they’re fine. They’re on a hunt out in Fall River and they’re stalled out. Something isn’t sitting right with the hunt and they’re reluctant to move.” 

He rubbed at his face. “I’m a little bogged down right now, Pastor.” He turned the page on the book in front of him to encounter a spell that would dispatch his enemies “threw ye Bowels, in a Forme of ye Brick.” 

“Aw, Sam, this is your family. I’ve tried every other scholar and lore-master I can think of. I even called Bobby Singer, and you know how he feels about your dad.”

Yeah, Sam knew. He knew he’d pulled a gun on John Winchester a long time ago, too long ago for Sam to remember why. “Yeah. It’s my family. And if they’d been the ones to ask I’d be happy to do this kind of crap for them, but they wouldn’t even let me keep in touch by telephone. They don’t know it’s me you’re asking, do they?”

“No, they don’t, but I’ll tell them if –“

“No. Don’t. Don’t even. They’ll refuse to use the research, go in half-cocked and get themselves killed falling through the floorboards in a rotting, abandoned triple-decker.”

He massaged his temples with his free hand. Jim was quiet for a moment. “How did you know it was a triple-decker, Sam?”

How had he known? He hadn’t even dreamed it. “It’s Fall River. I’ve been there before, remember? Dad thought a trip to the Bridgewater Triangle would help me ‘get my head in the game.’ I mostly spent the time filling out college applications. What are the details?” Jim sketched in some details about a house with a shady past, starting with a machinist who had murdered his whole family or something. It took him about three seconds to find the website with the details of the hauntings and the address, and hacking into the police department was kind of a joke. “Crap,” he said, already moving on to another window. He was going to need a new email account for this. “These records are too old to have been digitized yet. I’m going to need for them to scan copies of the paper police reports from that original case and send them electronically, okay? Here’s the thing though, they can’t know they’re working with me.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid?”

“No. they’re going to have to send them to you. Then you’re going to send them to me –“ he gave him the new email address he’d just created, the “Taurus67” account – “and I’ll take a look at the crime scene photos and see what I can come up with. Don’t expect speed here, okay? I’m really, really swamped.” 

“Thanks, Sam. I’ll try to manage their expectations. Is the courseload that intense at Stanford?” “Yeah, it’s pretty tight,” he admitted. “You know how it is. I’m taking five classes, double majoring, still working out, I’ve got my soccer team and the mock-trial team, I’ve got my… I’ve got a pretty active social life, you know, I guess it’s all kind of catching up to me right now. I really need to keep my grades up if I want to stay here and it isn’t like I’ve got anyplace else to go, you know?”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine, Sam.”

“Maybe.” He sighed. “Hey, Pastor Jim?”

“Yeah, Sam?”

“Can you aim me at a book that will tell me about spells that would make someone vomit blood and pins?” 

He could almost see his old friend blink. “I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“Thanks, sir.” 

“That come up often in pre-law?”

“No, sir. Microbiology.”

“Oh. Of course.” They hung up. He buried his head in his hands for a minute. Two cases. Great. He thought he’d come to Stanford to get away from that crap. 

Meli came by about ten minutes later with lattes. “You look like someone punched you in the gut.” 

He sighed. “Family drama.”

“I thought they cut you out, or you cut them out or something.”

“Yeah. Yes, to all of that. But apparently they need help with something and so now I need to find out about some dump across the country on top of everything else.”

She stood behind him and rubbed his shoulders gently. It was a nice feeling, not particularly sexual but warm and relaxing. “Did they actually contact you themselves?”

“Of course not. They can’t even know I’m involved, or else they’ll toss the research and get themselves killed.” He shook his head. “Don’t worry, Meli. The microbiology witch is the biggest concern. People are actually dying here, and it’s, you know, here. Their issue is a much lower priority, since it doesn’t look like anyone is getting hurt except for idiot hunters who go in without research.”

She laughed. “Valid. So what have you got?”

“Schedules for all of the involved students along with typical use patterns on their dining points and gym usage. We should be able to figure out when it will be easiest to get into their residences to snoop around. I don’t want to start poking around until we know what we’re looking for though, you know?” He sipped from his latte. They’d never been an option before, but this was pretty good. The milk mitigated the harshness of the brew, turned it from a necessary sinus-cleansing tear to a pleasant experience. “And do you know what we’re looking for?” she wanted to know. 

“Not exactly. I’ve got some idea but I’d rather be more specific if we can be, you know? I’d hate to go waste someone innocent because they had a Black Sabbath logo tattooed on their backside, you know?” He grinned. “If we can be asked for help we can ask for it, right?”

She ruffled his hair. “Good thinking, Sam.” 

Over the course of the next week Sam broke into no less than six residences. The good news was that he didn’t seem to be dealing with a coven. Steve, who used to have a thing with Meli, was not apparently practicing black magic but had picked up an unsavory habit of watching some of the more degrading pornography available. Sam made sure to disinfect after leaving that room. Two others could be eliminated easily based on basic personality – they were far too fastidious about cleanliness to get involved with spellcasting. It was as Meli had said – microbiology, like most hard science, depended on a hyper-clean environment and these two took that tendency to extremes. Their apartments smelled like bleach. The remaining three all had some suspicious symptoms, though. One had a bunch of weird herbs in a bin under her bed, but at least one of them turned out to be marijuana when the freshman sniffed it. Another, Mark Lehane, had three books missing from an otherwise scrupulously organized shelf that contained no academic texts. And another had jars of unlabeled substances that could have been just about anything in the fridge in his student apartment, a facility he did not share. Sam did not sample the jars. He knew better than that. 

He asked Meli to get more clues about their whereabouts and habits. In the meantime, he went about his regular routine of exercise and schoolwork and business. The scanned images and reports came the day after he asked for them, which put more work on his plate but he couldn’t help but snort. “Winchester Insurance Agency?” Seriously? Which one of them had come up with that piece of creative brilliance? Over the course of the next week he had the time to come up with a theory and report on it, and by Saturday he sent it back to Jim. He had bigger problems on his hands, frankly, because Meli came to him on Saturday night with another body. The second-ranked person in the program – who coincidentally happened to be the person with the bag of weed under their bed – had been killed in a fire.

* John*

The walls had bled. The actual walls had run with actual blood. This wasn’t something John had encountered in his long career before. He’d seen it mentioned but he hadn’t actually encountered the phenomenon. Dean had alleged that they had some company but he didn’t actually see anything. He said he’d driven it of with his crowbar. “We need to come back with a ladder or something, sir,” the boy told him. “We can’t do much if we can’t get upstairs.” 

For a moment he considered fighting, but he knew the boy was right. “All right. Let’s go.” They raced for the stairwell even as the sound of scraping nails filled the air. His son grunted and stumbled but kept moving as they ran down and toward the back door. A dark figure blocked the exit. This one was tall, as tall as John himself. The only feature it had was a flash of red light where its mouth should have been, cracking the blackness with an obscene parody of a smile. John brought his pistol up.

“You can’t kill the dead,” it hissed and reached out, icy fingers freezing his face. 

“Maybe you can’t,” he retorted and pulled the trigger. The shadow dissipated and the men raced away as fast as they could. John started the pickup before he had even completely gotten into the driver’s seat and Dean hadn’t actually closed the door before the vehicle was in reverse and speeding toward the road. 

“Well,” Dean summarized. “That thoroughly sucked.” 

The father touched his face. The space where the ghost had touched it still felt numb. “That’s a classy way of putting it, Dean.”

“Well it did, man. It touched you! I’ve never seen a ghost like that!” He shook his head. 

“We need to get upstairs and see what’s what.” “We’ll go back again, believe me. We’re not walking away from a job like this.” He forced himself to control his breathing. He was the adult here. He was the veteran. “We know iron vaporizes them. That means they’re the same as any other ghost.”

“Dad, that mother touched you – just touched you – and left huge bruises on your face. That ain’t like any other ghost.” Dean sighed. “Freakin’ ‘Taurus67’ didn’t tell us about that.” 

“He did say that the spirits would be darker and more powerful. It’s not his fault we couldn’t get upstairs. I’m more concerned about that blood. It was coming out of the walls themselves. I’ve never seen that before. I want to talk to this guy, see if he’s heard of anything like that.” 

“You trust him? Seriously?”

“Pastor Jim thinks he’s solid, Dean. Jim’s a solid guy.”

“It’s just you never trusted –“ 

“That was different. He needed to learn his place, and his place wasn’t to question it was to do as he was told.” Then there was the other stuff. If demons thought Sammy had been special, could he ever really be trusted? He couldn’t actually say something like that to Dean, though. He didn’t want to shake the kid’s faith in his brother, to break the bond between them. “And he wasn’t capable of doing it, was he?”

“No, sir.” 

They drove in silence for a moment. “You hungry, Dean?”

“Always.” They pulled into a drive through and got burgers. “It is so nice,” he said, “to be able to get a meal without having to worry about anyone’s prissy little stomach.” He said it without thinking and he immediately felt bad. It wasn’t like the kid had complained much. He just didn’t eat. He’d complain if called on it, if John had tried to force the food on him, but if left to his own devices he generally wouldn’t say anything. They drove back to the apartment afterward. John couldn’t resist the siren song of the bottle and he didn’t really try. Neither did Dean. 

For a while they drank in silence. “It’s nice, this,” John finally observed.

Dean’s bleary eyes glanced around the room. He was probably ready for bed but since his bed was the couch that wasn’t going to happen, so he poured himself another shot. “Come again?” 

“This. Just a night in, having some drinks with my son.” 

Maybe Dean’s smile was a little weak, maybe not. It was hard to tell. “Having some drinks with my dad.” They clinked glasses.

“No one to sit there and glare at us.” 

“Give us bitchfaces while he does the research.” 

“Complain about the roaches.”

“He’d be all full of … of vinegar about that.”

“Dean?” 

“Huh?” 

“What made him happy?” 

“What?” 

“I don’t think I saw that kid smile since he was like eight. What made him happy?” 

“Hell if I know, Dad.” He sighed. “We did fireworks once, I think he was like thirteen. You weren’t around, it was jus’ us. It’s probably the last time. He didn’t have a lot of outlets, you know? Hated the life, hated fighting, hated killing things.” 

“He was good at it.” And he had been. He’d been damn good at it. He never had the killer instinct it was true – he never wanted to do it. But when you got him in a fight he did what he actually had to do with a ruthless efficiency. “You came out right. How the hell did I go wrong?”

“You didn’t, Dad. You did the best you could under the circumstances.”

“Then why the hell is he in California instead of here with us where he belongs?”

“Because I didn’t do my job,” he sighed. “I’m the one who fucked up, Dad. I couldn’t keep him around. I wasn’t enough. He didn’t need me enough. Or maybe I just wasn’t strong enough to be what he needed.” 

Half the bottle was gone. That was why Dean had this crazy idea that he’d somehow caused this, that he’d screwed up with Sam. “Of course you were, Dean. He loved you. Still does. Remember he wanted you to go with him?”

“Yeah. Like I’d ever stop hunting. Like I’d let him stop. This is what we do, Dad. Fam’ly business and all that. ‘F he don’t want to be part of the business then he ain’t part of the family.”

Dean’s words ran together like molasses. He needed to go to bed. John stood up and staggered into the bedroom, passing out face-first on the bed with his boots still on. His face still felt frozen, but he suspected that the whiskey wasn’t helping. Dean was a good son. Dean didn’t think he was above his father. He didn’t think he was too good to hunt, he didn’t think he was too good to share a drink with his old man. Didn’t think he was above fun. 

The next day he woke up with a terrible hangover. Dean was no better. They agreed through a series of grunts that a greasy breakfast would be in their best interests, and they found a diner that promised to provide exactly that. Afterward they returned to the apartment where they found some early season Patriots on the television and called Pastor Jim. His friend was surprised to hear about the shadow figures. “I’ve never heard about a ghost that looks like that,” he said. “It’s very strange. I think my friend’s report told you that the spirits were likely to be more intense, am I right?”

“Yeah, but that was something else. And the blood in the walls – it was like someone had cut an actual limb,” he marveled. “Seriously, Jim. It was bizarre.”

“I think Bobby Singer saw something like that down in Nashville one time. I’ll ask him about it.”

“Is there any way you could get your friend to come out here and work with us on this? I’d feel a lot better if we had someone with us who knew more about these rituals.” He reached for the second coffee he’d brought back from the diner.

Jim chuckled. “No possible way, I’m afraid. He’s taking time out from his own job to help you.” 

“What kind of job? Maybe we could help him when we’re done with ours.”

“It’s hard to say. He’s a secretive guy, and I don’t think he’d take your help, John. You’ve pissed off a lot of people in your day.” 

“I suppose I have. Still, this might be bigger than us.” 

“Then walk away. Back-burner it until someone can come help you out. Don’t just go in there and half-ass it. You don’t need to be reckless about this one, John. No one’s even squatting in there.” He sighed. “I’ll talk to him, see if he can come up with anything about the blood or the shadow figures. Expect it to take a while, like I said. He’s busy.” They exchanged pleasantries for a little while, then they hung up.

“Hey, Dean,” John said thoughtfully. “Why don’t you reach out to this guy?”

“Who, this Taurus fellow?” 

“Yeah, why not? We’ve got his email address, why don’t we connect with him direct? I’ve never liked dealing with middlemen. Don’t get me wrong, Jim’s a great guy, but I’d rather go straight to the source, wouldn’t you?” 

He shrugged. “Sure thing, Dad. If that’s what you want.” He opened the laptop and started typing. “Why don’t we go do some target practice or something after this, get our minds off it for a while?”

That, John thought, was a very good idea.

*Dean*

Dean’s message to Taurus was pretty basic. “Hey, my name is Dean Winchester. Jim Murphy said you’re the one who gave us the details on the Fall River ritual murder. We’ve run into a road block on the job and we could use a little help. I know Pastor Jim said you’re kind of a lone wolf but I’m not sure we can do this one by ourselves.” Then he hit send and went shooting with his dad. When he got home there was no reply. Well, the guy was on the west coast or something like it, right? Maybe he was a late sleeper. He grabbed a beer and started cleaning the guns – you could never clean the guns enough, that was what he always said.

About an hour later he got a message back from the guy. “What’s your road block?” 

“Can’t you come out here? We could really use the backup,” he replied. “You seem to know an awful lot about these kinds of rituals. It would be good to have an expert with us in case things go south.”

“Sorry, no. I can’t just pick up and be in Massachusetts. Besides, the ritual has been over for fifty-odd years. You don’t actually need me there. Tell me what your road block is and I’ll try to help you out from here but I have to tell you I’m kind of swamped.” 

He described the shadow figures he’d seen and the abilities they seemed to have, detailing the injuries that he and his father had received. He talked about the blood in the walls and the fact that they couldn’t seem to get into the top floor. He talked about the state of the house too – they were planning to head back in with a ladder but he wasn’t so sure that the place was structurally able to handle it. “It would be best if you could just see this stuff for yourself,” he pointed out.

“Not a hunter,” the guy told him. “Also, I’m kind of busy here.”

“What, you’ve got a pretty girl there or something?”

“Several, actually. And a job that I just can’t up and leave on a moment’s notice, because I’m not a hunter. And did I mention that I’m not a hunter? Because I’m not actually a hunter. I’m a scholar.” 

“So you’re willing to just let people die because you can’t leave your girls and books? Is that it?” It had always worked on Sammy. Well, until it hadn’t. 

“Dean, the house has been abandoned for years. No one has even been squatting there for over a decade and if my sources are correct then locals even cross the street to avoid it. The only people who are going to die are dumb-ass hunters who can’t figure out how to wait until they know what’s going on before going in with guns blazing, and that’s on them not me. This job here is a witchcraft case and people are actually dying, as in two bodies dropped in two weeks. Promising scientists, with more to come if I don’t focus. I’m willing to help you but you need to recognize that actual human beings dying now trumps a building that people have the sense to stay away from and that goddamn Winchesters don’t get to set the priorities for the rest of the population.”

Dean bit his lip. He could almost hear the keys smashing on the other end of the line and it was entirely well deserved. “Sorry, man. I’m just used to having to corral my little brother. I shouldn’t have made assumptions. Witchcraft, huh? I hate witches. Need a hand?” 

“Thanks, but I’ve got help. Like I said, not a hunter. And my partner has had some not-so-great experiences with your dad in the past, so I think minimizing Winchester involvement is key.”

“Dad’s personality can certainly leave an impression,” he admitted. It wasn’t disloyal if the old man admitted it himself, was it? “He gets things done though.” 

“I’m sure. We’ve got this, though. I’ll email you if and when I come up with something.” 

“I thought you needed to focus on your witch?”

“You never know what you’re going to stumble on.”

That night they decided to pursue a simple salt-and-burn to bring their spirits up. They’d found it while researching the main case and put it to the side but really, there wasn’t much to this one. It was a basic haunting in a school, a teacher who couldn’t let go. She wasn’t even killing anyone, but she was making one room in an elementary school completely uninhabitable and that was just stupid. If Dean paid taxes, which he didn’t, he’d be furious at the waste of his tax dollars. He got tossed around a little but he managed to keep the spirit distracted while Dad torched the corpse and that was the important thing, right? Dad needed him.

They went back to the apartment and went to bed, no new messages from Taurus to give them some direction. The couch was not exactly gentle on his bruises but that was okay – dad was older, he needed the bed more. Besides, he could flip channels out here if he found sleep challenging. The next day he went out by himself, picked up a little extra cash and met up with Brandi. That was a good thing, she helped him blow off some steam and relax a little. They picked up a ladder and trussed it up to the back of the truck. Dean emailed Taurus. “How’s your witch thing going?”

The reply didn’t come for like eight hours. “We’ve got a good lead. Don’t get distracted by the blood. It’s just blood, it can’t hurt you. Don’t ingest it obviously, that’s just gross, but casual contact on intact skin shouldn’t be a problem. Your ghosts are shadow figures. They’re more powerful than regular ghosts, just like I warned you. From what I’ve heard it’s possible that the way the ritual happened and got screwed up made it so that anyone who dies in that house gets trapped there and becomes a shadow figure themselves so I don’t think you’re going to be able to fix the place no matter what you do. Torch it. Burn it completely. If you can get upstairs to destroy anything left, great. If not, don’t take unnecessary risks. I know you Winchesters like to do your best to die, but there’s no actual heroism here. You’re not saving anyone, no one is dying because of this thing anymore. Just get out and torch it. Consecrate the ground to be on the safe side.”

“Can a layman do that?” He sent the message and waited for a moment but it was clear that Taurus had gone away again. He got up and went to go work out, then shared the message with his dad. After five more hours he got another message, this one just an attachment with a Latin text. Damn he wished Sammy was here. Dad had tried to make him learn Latin but he’d never been much good at it. This could be a consecration prayer. It could be an invocation calling on the power of Lucifer himself. It could be a pizza recipe. They were going to have to trust this guy who sure seemed to have a grudge against the Winchesters. It just didn’t sit right with him. He pulled out his phone, pulled up Sammy’s number. It would be so easy to just call him. Dad would never even have to know. But Dean would know. It would be wrong.


	6. Seems that the Wrath of the Gods got a Punch on the Nose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam has an encounter with a pre-med witch and the elder Winchesters finish the triple-decker job.

*Sam* 

He wanted to sleep. Dear God, all he wanted to do was sleep. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Not with a witch running around wasting students. Seriously, who did that? Who seriously turned to the Dark Arts to bump their place in the class rankings up by a couple of places? Couldn’t they just… you know… study? If Sam could place well even with his background and insomnia and a hunt and secretly backing up his family and the discovery of social life and sex then couldn’t this jerk just crack the book or get a damn tutor or something? He forced the uncharitable thoughts down. They weren’t productive. Right now he had to focus on figuring out which of the two candidates was his actual witch.

He and Meli had narrowed it down; now they just had to guess at who was who and that was proving to be easier said than done. Reggie Zapetto was a brilliant, driven, more than a little neurotic student who ranked seventh in the class now that the top two had been erased. He kept odd unlabeled substances in his refrigerator and the only class in his entire career that he had any trouble acing was Eccleston’s. Mark Lehane, who ranked thirteenth before the deaths and now ranked eleventh, was open and affable to all who met him and kept an entire shelf of books that weren’t even remotely academic. Sam wasn’t one to cast stones on that account but they were organized by size, and who did that? 

Once the suspects were narrowed down Meli handed him a little leather pouch. “What’s this?” he asked her as she brought dinner to his room one night. “Thanks for this,” he added, indicating the bowl of chili. “I forgot again.” 

“I know you forgot again. You’ve been here for what, a month? I see how you get when you’re concentrating. How’d you get so tall when you forget basic things like eating and sleeping? This is a gris-gris. It’s for protection.” She sat down. “How’s it going?”

He showed her the notes he’d made. He’d prefer to have spread things out, diagramming it out on the wall so he could stare at it and let inspiration come, but that was a bad idea here. There were too many people who had gotten into the habit of coming into his room as they pleased. Project management software, though, did the trick almost as well. “Well, I think we need to follow these guys and figure out where it is that they go, you know? It’s kind of equally likely to be either of them. This Zapetto guy is still kind of sketchy though – if he’s not our witch he might be into something equally shady, just mundane. What’s in the bag?”

“Herbs, specialized dirt, other stuff. They’re powerful protection. Are we going to follow these guys?”

“No. I am, though.”

“You think just because I’m a woman I can’t do the job?” she snapped. 

“No. That’s not it at all,” he told her turning around and taking her hand. “Look. You know about hoodoo, and I don’t. You’re sharing things with me and I appreciate that, because I want to learn as much as I can about keeping myself and my loved ones safe. You know about biology, and science, and math, and while I know something about those things you know a hell of a lot more about those things than I ever will and I’m okay with that. You know Stanford. You know the campus, you know the culture here. And you’re teaching me. 

“What I know better than you is this – hunting. I know how to follow a person without being seen. You have some ways to hide me from them and I appreciate that, but when it comes to the normal five senses I know I’m damn good at not being found when I don’t want to be. I know how to break into places I’m not supposed to go, and I know how to find the things I’m not supposed to find. And I know how to kill a lot of the things that are out there.

“If you actually want to know about that side of things I’ll help you learn. I’d rather you didn’t because it’s a crappy life, it’s an awful way to live and you wind up wanting to scrub out your very insides every day, but if that’s what you want I’ll help you. But you’re going to learn on something that’s a little less dangerous than a damn witch, okay? You wouldn’t train a fighter pilot in the middle of a firefight for their first flight, and I wouldn’t do that to you.” He sighed.

“You’re going to kill the witch, aren’t you?” she whispered.

“He’s killing the other med students,” Sam pointed out. “I don’t want to. I don’t like doing it. But… can you see any other way here? I mean, if it’s not an actual witch – if I can’t find proof that it’s him, I’m not going to do anything. I can’t in good conscience just sit by and watch while he goes around and kills innocent people though. Can you?” 

She looked away and then she looked him in the eye. “No. No, I guess I can’t.” She dropped his hand. “So what was your first hunt?” 

“Like, first hunt or first solo?” She nodded at the second. “Honestly? Witch. But it’s not the same,” he insisted at her outraged/amused expression. “My dad and my brother were insisting that it was just a vengeful spirit and told me to stay in the car. They were going to get themselves killed.” 

“How did you know it was a witch?”

“Did the research, found the hex bags. Found one in my dad’s coat when I was unpacking the gear and burned it, too.” He shrugged. “They were pretty pissed.” 

“You saved their lives.”

“I disobeyed orders.” 

She opened her mouth, closed it again. “How old were you?”

“Thirteen? Fourteen? I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway, you know? I’m done now. I’m doing this because it’s here, in my face. I’m doing it to keep you safe, this place safe. I’m not out there like some psychopath looking for something new and different to kill.” He turned back to the laptop screen. He could feel the rage, a palpable thing welling up from his abdomen toward his gullet. So much for the chili. “Anyway,” he said when the red spots passed. “It’s kind of a coin toss as to who is who, but I’m going to follow Lehane first and see if I can’t figure out where it is that he goes.”

“Why Mark? Why not Reggie first? Reggie’s the one with things in his fridge.”

The freshman considered. “Because Reggie has things in his fridge,” he said finally. “I mean, it’s unsanitary and gross and he might be a terrorist or something, but if he is he’s a really clumsy one. Anyone practicing black magic knows that eventually someone else is going to catch on and come looking. He’s got to be incredibly naïve or arrogant to be keeping that sort of thing in his own apartment, with his own name on the lease and everything, you know? So out of the two choices I’m guessing that Lehane is the more likely candidate but I need more proof.” Dad wouldn’t need proof, of course. Dad would just go in, guns blazing. He’d probably even be right. Was he dithering too much, being too “nice” about it?

“Okay,” she said, sitting down. “How are you going to go about it?”

“Carefully.” He indicated his notes. Pastor Jim hadn’t found him any kind of specific blood-and-pin spewing spell but he’d been able to find some commonalities between different types of black magic-related spells and some components often linked to Belphegor. If Lehane had enough of them hidden away somewhere it would be a good indicator that he was their guy.

He got his chance the very next day. The target – average height, average build, average hair, in short everything Sam wasn’t – left after his lab time and didn’t go home. He aimed himself toward the athletic complex, weaving a circuitous path through the campus to deter any casual observers. Sam of course was not casual so he was able to continue his pursuit. The athletic complex was substantial of course and it wasn’t really surprising when he aimed himself at the pool area – research indicated that he preferred to swim as his primary form of exercise. He had to be more careful when Lehane sneaked past the locker rooms, down toward the sub-basements even beneath the pool. Down here were the chemical rooms, the pump rooms and the boiler rooms. 

Sam grinned. He wasn’t good for much but this, this he’d always been good at. Neither Dean nor Dad was half as good at sneaking or silence as he was. Hell, half the time they didn’t even know he’d followed. This guy, this subdivision-raised guy who was offering up his soul for a better med school placement, he had no idea. He followed his quarry back into the bowels of the building, letting him lead to an unmarked red door. He let the guy open the door and close it behind him. He waited about thirty seconds and then he moved forward, picking the lock quickly and expertly. The room was not large. It featured an altar at the far end, covered by a black cloth. How would the demon this jerk served feel if he knew that his altar consisted of cinderblocks and an old door? There were candles, already lit, and an open manuscript. 

Lehane turned around, startled and stark naked. “Who are you?” he demanded, ritual knife in one hand.

“Someone who’s glad he didn’t eat before coming here,” Sam replied, glancing away in disgust. “Dude. Seriously?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” the senior muttered. “Just go away and leave me alone. This is private time.”

“What you’re doing isn’t exactly private,” Sam told him, keeping his eyes on the knife. “You’ve killed two people already and I’m guessing you’ve got your eye on a third.” 

The magician turned fully then. “You’re him, then.” His face had turned pale.

“Sure. I’m him. Who exactly am I?” 

“He warned me not to let you know what I was doing. It doesn’t actually concern you, you know. It’s not your program. I just need to get to a point where my place is secure and then I’ll stop. It’s not like I want to be doing this, you know?” His hand trembled. 

“Look, you can’t go around wasting your fellow students, okay? It’s just not… I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation. So you wind up at UNC instead of Duke. You’re still going to wind up with M. D. after your name. Or you would have, because the thing with this stuff, Mark? It doesn’t let you go. You’re voluntarily giving yourself to a demon, Mark. It doesn’t lead anywhere good. You don’t get to stop it when you want to. It’s not like a drug. You can’t stop it by going cold turkey. You give yourself over, you become a slave. And it’s too late for you.”

He shook his head. “No. No, it isn’t. Belphegor told me that I’ll go on to live a normal, healthy, happy life after I’m done with this. All I’m doing is moving up a few places.” He shook his head. “I was really hoping that you’d see it my way, but I guess there’s always option B.” He threw the knife. 

Sam watched as the weapon clattered against the wall. “Right. You’re pretty new at this, aren’t you?” He drew his own knife – not a ceremonial blade but a normal, utilitarian and unpleasantly sharp killing tool – and sliced across the magician’s throat. He spun his victim around as he did so, ensuring that he wouldn’t get more blood than necessary on his own clothes. When the spurting stopped he dragged the corpse by its heels back to the boiler room. Fortunately the thing was old enough that it wasn’t difficult to open it and stuff the salted body inside. Next came the cleanup of the actual scene. He considered leaving the room but then there might be a haunting and that would just make work for him later or worse – bring his family back to Palo Alto. (Did he not want to see them? Or did he just not want to see Dad?) This was something else he was good at, crime scene cleanup. When he handled it even the best forensic team would never know that there had been a crime. Even Dad would never know anything had happened here – it wasn’t like he hadn’t tested that before.

He looked at the room. It was empty. He could sympathize.

All that was left was the book. It was a manuscript – Latin, old. Thankfully it was written on actual parchment not human skin or anything like that. He considered burning it. His father would have burned it. Pastor Jim would have kept it. Both men were hunters. Sam was not. Sam was a scholar. He slipped the book into his bag, made sure he himself was clean and made his way in the dark back to his dorm room. 

Once there, he sent a text to Meli. “It’s done,” he told her. She arrived at his room within thirty seconds. He described the scene, how he had killed the witch and disposed of him. He showed her the book. “Why did you keep it?” she asked, recoiling. 

“Knowledge,” he replied simply. “If we know what to look for next time maybe no one will have to die.” 

She sighed and rested a head on his shoulder. He let her.

* John*

John looked at the messages from “Taurus.” “Well, he doesn’t like us too much, does he?” Actually it wasn’t Dean that Taurus had the problem with, it was John himself but that didn’t matter much. They were a unit. Dean took his orders from John and if you couldn’t deal with John then there wasn’t much point to trying to deal with Dean. That was how it should be. It was like the Yankees – no names, just numbers on the uniforms. And he shouldn’t even feel guilty about that.

His son shrugged. “I don’t know. He doesn’t have the highest opinion of us and our priorities but he’s willing to help us out, you know? Even though he thinks this is kind of low-level stuff.”

“How is this low-level? This is major stuff!” he exploded, slamming his hand on the table hard enough to make the bottles jump. “The shadow figures are not ‘low-level.’ The blood in the walls is not ‘low-level,’ Dean.”

“But Taurus is right. No one even squats there anymore and the locals won’t even come near the place. Compared to what this guy is apparently dealing with it’s pretty small potatoes, because no one is actually dying. Now a witch taking out college students, that’s got actual people dying right now, people who are near him. I can see where that might take priority for him.” He grinned. “He’s helping us from a distance. Assuming that that’s a consecration ritual and not a recipe for some kind of medieval porridge or something.”

John glanced at the ritual. “Yeah. It’s a real ritual all right. I remember it; Sammy translated it when he was a kid. I made him write it out a hundred times as punishment once.”

“I remember that,” Dean chuckled. “It was that time you made him do target practice instead of playing in the division finals on his birthday. What was he, like, ten?” 

“Target practice is important, Dean. He needed to be ready.” Was that when this whole mess started? “We cut him too much slack letting him play soccer at all. It gave him foolish ideas.”

“Hey, you’re preaching to the choir, sir.” He held up his hands. “It seemed like a good way to get his stamina up, but you’re right. I just remember how pissed he was. I think the only way you got him off that field was by picking him up and stuffing him in the car. He needed a lesson.” He remembered the blisters on Sammy’s hand after having to copy out the ritual over and over, how he’d actually had to switch to doing his homework with his left hand. “Yeah.” He remembered the look in the boy’s eyes too and wondered exactly what lesson the boy had taken away. “Anyway, that’s a perfectly valid ritual. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need any components or anything, but we’ll smudge the place with sage to be on the safe side when we go in.” 

Dean gestured to the computer. “Pastor Jim says we should take some extra precautions, stick this crap into the walls before we torch the place.” 

The older man rubbed his face. “I’m a little iffy on the whole ‘cleanse it with fire’ thing, Dean. I mean, credit card fraud is one thing. So is murder. But torching a local landmark, even if it is a landmark for being an eyesore, is kind of a bad way to stay off the radar.” 

“I thought you said you trusted Taurus,” his son questioned. He wasn’t challenging, not even remotely. That wasn’t Dean’s style. Those green eyes looked up at him with all the love and trust a father could ever want, be he five or twenty-three. 

“I do – when it comes to black magic rituals. I’m a little leery of taking hunting advice from someone who doesn’t have to pay the consequences of actually getting his little hands dirty. Someone who knows so much about black magic probably isn’t exactly entirely trustworthy anyway, if you know what I mean.” He stood up and stretched. “Did Jim have anything to say about Taurus’ advice?”

“He said it was pretty sound. He ran it by Bobby Singer, who said it was pretty solid too just with more cursing.”

“Singer always did have a mouth on him.” Was Taurus’ partner Bobby Singer? It would explain his need to keep the Winchesters out of it. Singer had always been a little more open-minded on the subject of the occult than a lot of hunters. “All right. Let’s see if we can figure out a way to light the place up safely without leaving any evidence.” 

Dean actually came up with the plan for that – silly but brilliant in its simplicity, and who would have thought he had it in him? A tiny treacherous part of John’s brain pointed out that Sam had. Sam had outright accused him of sabotaging Dean’s brilliance on more than one occasion, and not even belting the kid had stopped him. Was there any truth to the hateful words? Dean drew up the plan and explained how it would work like it was the simplest thing in the world and maybe it was. The accelerants wouldn’t even show up for arson investigators – at most they’d suspect squatters and an overturned candle. All they had to do was to get enough of the stuff indoors and let it happen. Their shopping trips took a few days to accomplish – not because they were all that extensive but because they wanted to avoid raising suspicions. Some of the supplies involved junk food and Dean couldn’t avoid eating some of it, and that was also a problem. They also needed herbs for the packets they would stuff into the walls and sage for the rubbing. 

In the meantime Dean checked in with Taurus, who had apparently taken care of his little witch problem. He didn’t offer any details, although when Dean asked him he did explain that the guy seemed to be pretty new at this but wouldn’t be expanding his knowledge at all. “Did he take the guy out, Dean?” he asked.

“He didn’t say, Dad,” the youth replied. “He just said he wouldn’t be a problem for anyone anymore.”

“We need to know. Do we need to make a trip out west now and hunt this guy ourselves?” 

“He says that the guy won’t be a problem anymore, Dad. That’s all he said. He hasn’t answered any of my other questions.”

“Damn it, Dean. Do we need to hunt this Taurus guy now? Talk to Pastor Jim. See if he can get a read on where Taurus is. I want to know if he’s giving a pass to witches now. We can’t let that kind of thing slide, Dean. You know where it leads.”

Dean sighed. For a moment John thought he had Sammy back, just from the sigh and the eye roll. The rage that welled within him was the same as it was with Sammy too, but he quelled it. Dean was the good one. Dean was obedient. Dean was even then opening the laptop and typing. “I’ll ask him, sir.” A hunt out west would give him an excuse to look in on his youngest, too. Not that he should, but what the Hell. He should know if the kid was getting up to anything he shouldn’t. 

*Dean*

Getting back into the abandoned triple-decker wasn’t exactly hard. They laid the seeds for the place’s destruction over the course of three nights. Dean had half expected the tinder to disappear in between applications but they had no problems. Apparently the ghosts, who did not interfere during their visits other than the occasional thrown plaster chunk, didn’t see abandoned junk food as particularly threatening. Maybe they saw it as an offering. If Dean had been a trapped spirit he’d certainly appreciate the occasional bag of pork rinds. On the fourth night they returned, this time for real.

When they’d first come to Fall River it had felt like summer. Now the air carried a distinct chill made more pervasive by the sea breeze. That was fine by Dean. They’d warm up the night soon enough. Fortunately there weren’t any buildings standing near enough to the triple-decker to be endangered by what they planned. Now that Dean thought about it even that seemed odd. Triple-deckers didn’t usually exist in a vacuum. They entered on the ground floor again. This time they had their ladder. They didn’t need to look around much on this floor, since they’d already been here. They knocked holes in the walls at the cardinal points and tried not to get any of the blood on them. “Funny,” Dean commented to his father. 

“What’s that?” the senior Winchester asked.

“I’m not even bothered by the blood anymore.” 

“Familiarity breeds contempt.” 

They moved on, up the stairs to the second floor and repeated the process. Here Dean manned the shotgun while Dad repeated the process with the cleansing herbs and the walls. A shadow figure approached from the kitchen, but Dean dispatched it with the shotgun. Claws – nails, maybe? – caught his back from behind but he didn’t cry out. He didn’t want to distract his dad. Instead he grabbed an iron crowbar from his belt and slashed at the little boy’s shade like he had a sword. It worked, and the spirit disappeared. Dad worked quickly. He was, after all, the best. They carried the metal ladder over to the gaping hole in the front stairwell where the staircase should have been and found a solid piece of wood against which to brace it. “You hold the ladder for me, son,” Dad demanded. 

Dean obeyed, bracing the bottom of the ladder with one hand and keeping the shotgun steady with the other. A flashlight provided much-needed illumination, secured to the top of the shotgun like a targeting sight. He only had one hand but he managed to steady it against his ribcage as he fired against two more shades, unable to discern anything else about them. He knew Dad had reached the top when the Coleman lantern went on. At that point he scrambled up the ladder as fast as he could. 

When he was mid-way up the structure he felt it begin to sway. “Dean, hurry!” His father held it at the top – not nearly as secure as it would have been had someone held it from the bottom, but about as good as they were going to get. One of the shadow figures at the bottom tried its best to shake the ladder as he climbed. Just as he reached the top he felt the ladder move. Fortunately he was close enough for Dad to grab him under the arms. As the metal disappeared from under his feet he felt himself be hauled onto the soft wooden floor. He’d made it to the top apartment at last. “I’m not sure what I was expecting,” he said finally. “More carnage, maybe?”

“They did try to rent it out after the murders, Dean.” Dad walked around what was clearly the living room. “Come on.”

He picked up the Coleman and walked through what was probably a kind of dining room and into the kitchen. Here the furnishings looked almost original, or at least original to the murders. Hell, the Winchesters had stayed in worse apartments. They really built those appliances to last. He opened the oven, not even sure of what he’d find, and jumped back. The head opened its eyes. “I knew you’d join us,” the man said. The man’s head, anyway. The rest of him was… elsewhere. His forehead had been painted with what looked like blood and his cheeks with … ash, maybe? Dean let out a yell. His father came to see what the commotion was about. “Hello, Winchester,” the head greeted. “It’s good to see you. I see you’ve brought one of your little toy soldiers. Where’s the other one?” 

Dad’s face twisted in rage. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fist full of salt, cramming it into the thing’s mouth. It yelled as the poison took effect, blood bubbling to the surface. The Coleman started to flicker. “Big mistake, Winchester,” the severed head spat in what sounded like a hundred voices at once. Unseen hands grabbed at Dean, flinging him across the room and into the sink. His head crashed limply into the plywood covering where the window would be, smearing the blood from where the deck-death boy’s shadow had cut him onto the wall. He sagged, dazed as two more shadows converged on him. Another two shadows – probably kids in life, based on their size – grabbed at Dad’s ankles while two more grabbed at Dad’s arms. They held him still while still another approached him. Its hand was extended and what looked like fingernails extended. The talons raked across his chest. Dean recovered from his daze long enough to grab the crowbar off the floor. “Dad!” he yelled. His vision was kind of blurry but he could see well enough to cut through the shadows holding his dad’s arms. Another swing took out the figures holding his legs. “I think Taurus was right, sir.” 

“I hate to say it, but yeah. Let’s light it up.” He reached into his pocket and grabbed a roll of sage while Dean pulled more of his junk food out of his duffel and began scattering it around the top floor. There was plenty of dry junk up here, he wasn’t too worried about adding to it once things got going downstairs. (Sammy would have had a precise plan, with a distinct pattern for how everything would go up and the entire process would be exactly timed down to the millisecond.) Dad was muttering some kind of cleansing ritual as he smudged the apartment, the brightness of the glowing sage keeping shadows at bay. Dean opened up the piece of paper on which he’d scrawled the consecration prayer Taurus had sent them and then his father read that – Dean had thought about reading it but his Latin was really awful and this was not the time for a learning experience. The shrieks at the close of the prayer were incredible. Dean lit the tinder in the four corners and the pair scrambled for the stairwell. Aiming themselves for the right spot on the second floor proved challenging. Both men were injured and there were some distinctly tense moments as they swung to safety. Dad’s chest cuts would need attention, probably stitches. Dean himself had some bad cuts on his back as well as the bumps and bruises and at least a mild concussion so it was a little more touch and go in terms of aim but he made it. 

They rushed through the smudging and through the consecration before igniting the fires on this floor, walking down the stairs (which they also lit up) and repeating the process on the first floor. They smudged and consecrated the exterior of the property, which didn’t seem to attract any attention at all. Only one local seemed to notice at all, an elderly man who was probably Cape Verdean by his accent. “What are you doing here?” he asked, looking at the pair with one black and one milky eye.

“Uh, cleaning it up,” Dean replied. It wasn’t a lie.

“Good. The place was nasty.” And he went on his way. 

The pair looked at each other, shrugged and got into the truck. It wasn’t as though it was light enough to make out their faces, and the plates had been taken off the truck as a precaution. They drove back to the apartment. Dean tried to focus well enough to stitch up his father’s chest. His father had to thread the needle for him – which was the only way the old man was even aware that Dean had been injured – but still let Dean do the stitches. This would have been Sammy’s job. No one was better than Sammy at stitching, with his tiny, neat-freak little stitches. People stitched by Dean tended to look a little bit like Frankenstein’s monster and John Winchester would be no exception. Fortunately he didn’t seem to mind, being more focused on their victory here. After he’d been stitched and bandaged he sewed up Dean’s back and checked his concussion. 

They discussed the severed head. It had to have been an illusion. There was no way the successive tenants would have managed to not notice a severed head in their apartment for forty or fifty years or whatever it was before they stopped renting the joint. The next day they drove past. The entire structure had been reduced to a smoking ruin. No one had thought to call the fire department, or perhaps the fire department had decided to let nature take its course. It had been an attractive nuisance, after all – even though no one had gone near the place in quite some time it would always tempt people, and it had been a real eyesore. Now maybe the site could be re-used for something worthwhile. 

Dean sent Taurus a message, giving him the details of their hunt and explaining what had happened. The guy got back to him relatively quickly considering the time difference. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Dean,” he told him. “I wish you hadn’t been hurt. I’m not sure what could have caused the severed head to appear there – I thought the killer survived? Anyway, I’m glad you torched the place and cleansed it. Stay safe please. Also, yes, the bad witch is dead for what it’s worth. There’s no need for your father to come out here to follow up. The problem is solved.”

“Dude, how did you know that was what my dad was thinking?” he sent back.

“Because I thought to myself, ‘Self, what could possibly go wrong?’” he replied almost immediately. “Take care of yourself, Dean.” 

The hunter wasn’t entirely sure how to take that.


	7. Epilogue

Sam

Sam showered for a full hour after killing Mark Lehane. It wasn’t that he thought had literal blood on him, because he’d cleaned up well at the scene. And it wasn’t as though he thought he could actually clean himself, because in nineteen years he’d never managed to make himself actually feel clean for even a moment. No, it was because for the first time in his life he was in a position where he had unlimited hot water and no constraints on shower usage and he had the opportunity to make himself feel… well, clean-ish. So he showered for a full hour, scrubbing until his skin was red and raw and maybe a little bloody here and there and he didn’t actually care one bit.

Just as he couldn’t wash away his own freakishness he couldn’t wash away what had happened today. The guy had been killing people – other pre-med students. He hadn’t been doing it because he needed to survive, he hadn’t been doing it because it was them or him. He’d been doing it to move up in the class rankings, and that made him someone who had to be taken out. At the same time, He’d been a young guy, younger than Dean even. Young and bright and he’d only started down that road out of desperation and fear. Sam was intimately familiar with both emotions. Who was to say that he would be any better? And it wasn’t like the guy had been doing this for very long. He hadn’t learned to even defend himself yet. 

Dean would have told him that the guy had thrown a knife at him, that all of his arguments and whatnot were invalid because everything after that point became self-defense. Sam could almost hear his brother over (or maybe in) the spray of the water. That would be like justifying the murder of a five-year-old because it had kicked you in the knee. At that point he posed no threat to Sam whatsoever. He hadn’t even tried to use magic against him, probably because he was too new to witchcraft to know how. And Sam – larger Sam, stronger Sam, Sam who had been trained to fight for as long as he’d been walking upright – had just grabbed him by his naked shoulder and spun him around and slit his throat like it was nothing. Because ultimately it was. And of course demons – they didn’t care if you’d been doing your black magic thing for a week or a century or whatever. If you offered yourself to them in exchange for anything, once you were dead you were theirs. And Mark Lehane was irrevocably, certifiably, permanently and irretrievably dead. He’d gotten a one-way ticket to the hot box, and Sam had helped to send him there. Sure it was his choices that had put him on the path but Sam hadn’t exactly given him options to repent or redeem himself or find absolution or anything like that. He’d just slit his throat and stuffed him into the boiler like the monster he was. 

Like a hunter.

He’d come to Stanford to get away from this.

After he finished washing and bandaged his abrasions he slept. He slept for two days straight, Saturday and Sunday. He woke long enough to tell his soccer team he was under the weather, which was fine with all of them – no one else wanted to get sick. Then he locked the door, ignored any and all attempts at communication and pulled the covers over his head. After those two days he woke up and began to return to normal life. He responded to messages – from his friends, who believed that he had just been dealing with a bad cold, and from Pastor Jim and Dean. 

Jim, who knew the truth about who he was but not what he’d been doing, had been horrified to know that he’d taken on a witch by himself. Dean, who knew what he’d been doing but not who he was, had been more concerned about making sure he’d actually gotten the job done. Dean could be fobbed off easily because Dean didn’t care. Dean might have cared if he’d known who he was. Then again, he’d probably only care because he didn’t trust Sam to actually do something right, or to do something at all. Jim was less easy to deal with. Instead of trying to make it look like he was being stubborn he turned it around on his old friend. “I’m sorry, Pastor Jim. I just didn’t know where to go for help and time was really short, you know? If I knew who the local hunters were…” It had the desired results. Jim thought he was being cooperative and tractable, and Sam got a list of people to avoid. His father had gone to great lengths to avoid having Sam encounter any other hunters at all if possible. Sam had every intention of keeping it that way, and making sure that Meli could as well. Now he knew where they congregated as well. (It did occur to Sam that he’d just manipulated his last remaining tie to the hunting community, playing on his trust and emotions to buy himself some safety and security but what the Hell. He was the kind of guy who slit pre-med students’ throats. What was a little con game in the interests of peace? It wasn’t like he was hurting Jim.)

Dean and Dad were safe, too. They’d done something stupid, but they’d succeeded with only a few new scars. Some of their success had been thanks to Sam, even if they didn’t know it. Part of him resented the fact that he’d had to move across the country and hide his actual identity to be of any use to them but whatever – he’d helped them, and hadn’t had to watch Dean get hurt, so it was a win. Right? And after two jobs that were mostly concurrent he got to stay in the same place. He didn’t have to pack up. He got to see the same faces. He got to go to the same classes, work the same day job, play the same soccer games, talk to the same people. Harris and Brady engaged him in the same prank wars. Meli avoided him for a few days but returned friendlier than ever once she got over the whole killing people thing, or got past it anyway, and she even told him how to make a gris-gris of his own.

All in all Sam had to count it as a win, guilt about having to kill Lehane aside. He missed Dean more than anything in the world, but there was nothing he could do about that. Staying with Dad hadn’t been an option. Here he had actually accomplished something – several somethings, actually. He’d accomplished them on his own, without interference from his father or needing to be rescued by his brother.

For the first time in his life Sam Winchester was his own person.

*John*

Dean showed him the message from Taurus confirming the death of the witch. He’d have preferred a confirmation that included proof but this Taurus fellow wasn’t his, wasn’t one of his soldiers and didn’t need to prove himself to John. Didn’t even like John much from the sound of it. Worst thing that could possibly happen indeed. He’d find out, soon enough, because John was still planning to head out there himself. Maybe he’d look up this Taurus fellow. 

They took a few days after the house burned to recuperate. The city fenced off the site and made a token arson investigation, but found nothing. At the end of the day they’d only benefitted from the action, after all. It only took a few days before different community groups started making noise about different plans for the property, all of which sounded moot given that it was still in the hands of a private landowner. As it turned out the private landowner had absconded leaving a huge tax bill, so the city was able to eminent domain it fairly easily. A local priest suggested a playground named after the squatter kid who had died in the deck collapse, and with a tragic story like that very few people were going to argue about it. 

In a neighborhood like that John thought it sounded like an open invitation to junkies and drug dealers but hey – what did he care? It wasn’t like he and Dean were planning to stay, not past the hunts they still had lined up. 

After about a week of rest John’s phone rang. When he saw the Minnesota number he expected it to be Pastor Jim, although why the fellow wouldn’t call from his own parish he didn’t know. “This is John,” he answered crisply.

“John, I don’t know if you’ll remember me,” a woman told him shakily. “My name is Kate Milligan. You worked a … a case in Minnesota about thirteen years ago.” 

He thought back. “You were a nurse in the ER, right?” He remembered the pretty young nurse well enough. She’d been very friendly and he’d been so incredibly lonely. 

He could hear the smile in her voice. “Yeah. Yeah, I was the nurse. We, uh, we spent a few nights together.”

“I remember that.” Thank God Dean was out on a liquor run. “Oh God – is something wrong? Because I’m pretty sure I’m clean –“

“No no – I’m clean,” she assured him. “It’s just… um… I’m not entirely sure how to explain this, but… you’re a father, John. You have a son.” 

He was pretty sure that his heart stopped for at least a minute. “A son?” 

“Yeah. A son. A child, with male parts.”

“Sorry. This is… a surprise.” “Yeah, well, it was a bit of a surprise for me too but I guess I’ve had some time to get used to it.” She chuckled weakly.

“Why… why am I just hearing about this now?”

“Because… because I knew what kind of life you lived,” she sighed. “I didn’t think it was appropriate for a child, and I knew you couldn’t leave it. So… yeah. But he’s been asking about you. Who you are. He wants to meet you. I told him I’d call you, see if you were willing.”

“I can be there in three days.” He scrawled a note for Dean and left it on the table.

* Dean*

Dean came home to his father’s note. “Gone on a job. Be back soon.”

His heart sank. He had some cash – a couple hundred – and the apartment was paid up for another two weeks. He supposed it was time to go make some more. A trip to the local casinos took care of the cash flow problem, but it just wasn’t as much fun alone. Even if he did make some new “friends” to distract him while he was there. Mitzi and Jenna and Laci were plenty entertaining, but they couldn’t carry on a conversation about ganking spirits or hunting wendigos. Maybe they could. Who knew? It wasn’t like the subject could be brought up without sounding crazy.

He waited a few days. Nothing from Dad. He called Pastor Jim, who said he hadn’t heard from John Winchester in weeks. Jim did tell him Sammy was settling in nicely at college, though. A stab of bitterness ran through Dean. “That’s nice,” he said. “I’m real glad to hear he doesn’t need his family, after everything we’ve done for him.”

“You’re the ones that cut him off. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

“Sammy can go to Hell.” Jim sighed and changed the subject.

Dean picked up some of the lower-level hunts on the list. There was a salt-and burn in Rehoboth that was pretty routine. The spirit tossed him around a little but what were a few bumps and bruises? It was Sammy who didn’t want to muss up his pretty little face – Dean didn’t care. There was a black dog hunt over in Scituate. It wasn’t a great idea to go after black dogs alone but what the hell – Dean was bored and Dad had told him to wait, so he was going to wait. He got his side clawed up and needed a trip to the ER for that one, but it was worth it. He got the job done. He picked up some pool games, some card games. His thing with Brandi continued, and maybe he should call that one off because she was starting to get ideas about monogamy and that was just no good. The weeks stretched on, the apartment got grungier and Dean felt the absences. His brother was doing fine in California alone. His father was off God knew where doing who knew what, with no need for Dean. What was he supposed to do?


End file.
